"While much of the country has recovered from the recent recession, large areas of rural America have not fared as well. Nationally, 85 percent of persistently impoverished counties are in rural areas, and one in four rural children is growing…
Ranching families across this countryside are now facing an existential threat to a way of life that has sustained them since homesteading days: years of cleanup and crippling losses after wind-driven wildfires across Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle killed seven…