Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Americana
Development proposals tend to arrive one parcel at a time. So do the public decisions attached to them. A landowner wants to sell. The ground is outside town but close enough to market as a rural homesite. The developer has buyers. The road exists. The property is not in a floodplain. The tax projection looks […]
The building has stood at the corner for a hundred and eighteen years. Red brick, two stories, cast-iron columns flanking a recessed entry, a limestone date stone reading 1908. The ground floor has held a dry goods store, a five and dime, an insurance agency, and for the last six years a coffee shop that […]
The development application is straightforward on paper. Twelve residential lots on forty acres of prime ag land, five miles outside of town. The heirs of the family that farmed it want to sell. A developer has found buyers. The parcel is accessible from a county road. No wetlands. No floodplain. Nothing obviously wrong. The planning […]
The call comes on a Tuesday afternoon. Three siblings have inherited a half-section of ground from their mother, and they all moved to California or Texas years ago. A developer has offered to buy the west forty for twelve rural home sites of three acres each, on a gravel road five miles from the nearest […]
How Rural America Is Balancing Clean Energy, Conservation, and Community This is the second installment in JCShepard.com’s October energy series, exploring how the clean energy transition is reshaping rural communities. Last week, we examined global energy trends and how data centers and AI are driving unprecedented electricity demand in America’s heartland. In this post, we […]
Soil degradation is a growing environmental sustainability challenge for rural communities. Erosion, declining fertility, and nutrient loss threaten long-term agricultural productivity, impacting not just farmers but also water quality, infrastructure, and land-use planning. One of the simplest and most effective solutions? Cover cropping. Cover crops—plants grown between cash crop cycles to improve soil health—help prevent […]
