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Are you a farmer, rancher or food business entrepreneur interested in local and regionally-produced food? Are you a community leader wondering how local and regional food systems can help your local economy? Are you a consumer interested in learning more about where your food comes from?

Today about 6.1 million of America’s veterans live in rural communities. About 38 percent of military recruits call rural America home, but these communities face real economic challenges. So over the past two years – at President Obama’s direction – USDA and the rest of the federal government have...

Cross posted from the White House blog: Since the formation of the White House Rural Council in June 2011, we have had a unique opportunity to provide recommendations on how to grow the economy and create jobs in rural America. The feedback we’re providing to the White House, based on our travels...

Recently, in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, USDA Rural Development hosted a “Partners in Building Community Forum” in which the primary focus was to generate ideas that would promote job growth in Wisconsin. Over the past three years, USDA Rural Development has helped to create or save more than 1450 jobs...

Last week, USDA Under Secretary Dallas Tonsager made a brief, but impactful visit to Oregon joining USDA Rural Development State Director Vicki Walker to announce program support and celebrate milestones in rural economic development with local communities.

Recently USDA Rural Development Administrator for Business and Cooperative Programs Judith Canales joined Small Business Administration (SBA) officials in Syracuse, New York, to discuss opportunities to promote rural small business investment and job creation. The rural investment roundtable event...

Last week, President Obama traveled to the small town of Osawatomie, Kansas, where President Teddy Roosevelt once called for building an America where everyone gets a fair chance, a square deal, and an equal opportunity to succeed. One hundred years later, we are again at a make or break moment for...

While people have squabbled over the direction of federal forest management, many landscapes have declined. Take southwestern ponderosa pine, for example. Where thick grasses once waved under big orange-barked pines, thickets of spindly trees now threaten natural and human communities alike through...

The market for local food – food that is produced, processed, distributed and sold within a specific region, say a radius of several hundred miles – is growing. Large, small and midsized farms are all tapping into it. Even better, new data suggest that these producers are employing more workers than...

A new white paper titled An Explanation of Green Jobs Policies, Theory, Measurement Approaches, and Job Growth Expectations was written by Iowa State University through a cooperative agreement with USDA’s Office of Energy Policy and New Uses. The authors explore policy, theoretical foundations, and...