When Angela Arnold was laid off at the end of last year, she didn’t know if she would find work that would let her stay in Carbon County. [node:read-more:link]
This year was going to be different. The cotton looked good. Unbelievably good. Fat bolls loaded on compact stalks. A sea of white, as far as the eye could see. Matagorda County farmer Robby Reed was hopeful. Until a bad boy named Harvey paid a visit.Some say it’s the hurricane for the decades. For Robby, it’s the storm of a lifetime.He’s 39 years old—a young farmer by most standards. He’s suffered through hard times, but 2017 may be his toughest year yet.More than 20 inches of rain has fallen, and the family farm is completely underwater.Half of Robby’s cotton is still in the fields. [node:read-more:link]
There are 27 prisons within a 100-mile radius of Bertie County, North Carolina. Its last major employer is the Perdue chicken processing plant. It is a place of dirt roads, muddy tracks, trailer homes, sweltering heat, rows of cotton, and very little opportunity for ambitious youngsters. It’s here that we meet three African-American boys in their teens trying to find their place in a world with odds stacked high against them — overburdened schools with few resources, mass incarceration, and a lack of decent jobs. [node:read-more:link]
A university student has gone from stool to stools after transforming cow manure into a range of designer household furniture. [node:read-more:link]
Berlin's huge Tiergarten park is crawling with a species of crayfish native to America's Deep South. The Louisiana crayfish – also known as the red swamp crawfish – can be found swimming in the park's ponds and scuttling across its paths. Juergen Goette, responsible for the park's upkeep, said the invasive crustacean could have disastrous effects. "The crayfish is an omnivore. It feeds on practically everything that it finds, such as plants, fish spawn and frog spawn from native frogs. [node:read-more:link]
The AVMA is providing guidance and soon a toolkit to help veterinarians take on telemedicine in practice. On July 21 at its regular annual session in Indianapolis, the AVMA House of Delegates passed a policy on telemedicine and accompanying revisions to the Model Veterinary Practice Act, which is a model for state practice acts.Dr. [node:read-more:link]
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is updating procedures at a lock and dam on the upper Mississippi River to stop the spread of Asian carp. Previous methods for operating spillway gates at Lock and Dam 8 in Genoa created variations in the flow of water through the dam, allowing the invasive species to swim through places with a slower current.Nan Bischoff, project manager for USACE's St. [node:read-more:link]
A century’s worth of unchecked growth, he’ll tell you, has brought prosperity to many. But it also has altered the landscape in ways that have made both the droughts and the floods more destructive and made that prosperity fleeting. Much of the region sits atop the overtaxed Gulf Coast Aquifer, and though efforts have made over the last 40 years to limit withdrawals from it, enough water has been sucked out of it that the ground still subsides in some places, altering runoff patterns and allowing flood waters to gather. [node:read-more:link]
For the streets of Newton, a small town on the Texas side of the Louisiana state line, to become impassable, “the flood would have to be biblical,” Kristen Rogers was told when she peeked into the sheriff’s office looking for guidance. “That’s what they said about Houston,” replied Ms. [node:read-more:link]
On a 120-acre farm in Biscoe, North Carolina, near the edge of the Uwharrie National Forest, a flock of hair sheep takes shelter from the summer sun beneath a row of solar panels. They provide a valuable service to O2 emc – the Cornelius-based company that owns this solar installation – by preventing weeds that could block sunlight and decrease the panels’ efficiency.“What we’re trying to do is put agriculture and solar right next to each other,” says Brock Phillips of Sun-Raised Farms, who owns and manages the sheep. [node:read-more:link]
