“This has been the grain bin year.” Frankie Rollins, who has built grain bins for the past six years with Hart Steel, said the company has been busier than normal in 2014, and that more and more bidding competition is emerging in southeastern South Dakota. “I hear of a lot of new crews starting up, so it sounds to me like this year has been the grain bin year,” he said. Read More »
Long bus rides can have a significant effect on the rest of a child’s day. Superintendents in the Dakotas say they do their best to keep the bus routes as short as possible, but open enrollment and school district reorganizations can make this challenging. Read More »
Despite the challenge of finding enough volunteers—or in some cases, because of that challenge—many rural ambulance services have come up with creative ways to serve their communities better. Read More »
As rural ambulance services struggle to find enough volunteers to maintain their services, it’s the moments of that crucial golden hour that tick away when help takes longer to arrive, or even fails to arrive. Read More »
Rural ambulance departments across the Dakotas, which have struggled for years to have enough volunteer EMTs, are hitting a tipping point: Some are not able to continue as they have for decades. Others will face decisions in the next few years. What’s changed? How will it affect rural communities? How are people thinking differently about how to treat medical emergencies in rural communities? Read More »
You'll now find a new way to read Dakotafire's magazine stories: On any digital device you choose, whether computer, tablet or smart phone. Read More »
Britton hosted the first-ever Dakotafire Café event on Friday, and it served to fuel some thinking on how the community might do a better job of attracting workers. The event was the first in a series of group meetings planned by Dakotafire magazine to get people talking about the ideas presented in its latest publication. The Britton event was also ... Read More »
The first in a new series of events intended to spark community and regional conversations will be from noon to 2 p.m. Friday, March 28, at the Marshall County Community Building in Britton, S.D. The event, called a Dakotafire Café, intends to get people talking about the topics presented in the latest issue of Dakotafire magazine, according to Dakotafire Editor Heidi Marttila-Losure. “Most of our small towns have a place where locals gather to solve the world’s problems over a cup of coffee,” Marttila-Losure said. “These events are intended to bring that spirit of problem-solving conversations to the issues that affect our communities—which are the topics we try to address in the magazine.” Read More »
Both North and South Dakota perform well above the national average when it comes to high school graduation rates, but nationwide, graduation rates between rural and urban students are almost too close to call, accepting a margin of error: 83 percent and 86 percent, respectively. However, the discrepancy between rural and urban residents who have any amount of post-secondary education is a full 13 percentage points: 46 percent and 59 percent, respectively. So, why doesn’t that high graduation rate translate to post-secondary education the way it does for the urban population? Read More »
Advocates of the new technology say the new crops provide a vital weapon in the war against weed resistance to glyphosate, which is becoming a stubborn and costly problem for farmers across the country. Unfortunately, stubborn weeds aren’t the only thing that 2,4-D kills, and gardeners, vineyard owners and even other farmers of commodities who don’t switch to the new technology could be affected if the 2,4-D drifts onto their fields. Read More »
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