News from rural America.

Americans love burgers, but currently they’re busting the budget, a Colorado ranch is demonstrating cattle grazing and prairie conservation are simpatico, Illinois is trying to restore rain to parched parcels, and Congress considers cracking down on misleading recycling practices.

TRANSCRIPT

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

Craving a hamburger?

It'll cost you.

Beef prices are the highest in history, up 13 percent, due in part to a 70-year low in the domestic cattle herd.

But the remaining cattle are worth more.

Brian Shooter with the Indiana Beef Council says in previous years producers grew other crops to offset costs.

Crop production right now is not real profitable, but cattle production has been.

Red meat costs the most in the northwest in California, less in the Midwest and the Plains.

A pound of ground beef now averages $7, with steak at $13.

Beef is big in the American diet, but raising it doesn't have to destroy delicate ecosystems like grasslands.

Colorado's Fox Ranch on the Kansas-Nebraska border is demonstrating that strategic cattle grazing and native prairie conservation can coexist.

The Nature Conservancy's Tyler Smith helps guide the work.

Grasslands are so underappreciated and the most endangered terrestrial ecosystem on the planet.

So when cattle on Fox Ranch graze the grass to 14 inches, they're moved.

That leaves enough natural cover to protect rare species like the prairie chicken from hawks and other predators.

The Conservancy's William Burnage prepared the ranch for managed stewardship.

He says if you want to preserve grassland, you need grazing animals.

Many livestock producers realize at the end of the day that they're grass farmers.

The cow is how you harvest the grass and turn it into something of value economically.

In Illinois, the Nature Cools Project is researching how healthy soils, trees, and diverse plants can address climate change and restore local rainfall.

Scientists working with the Climate Land Leaders Initiative say living landscapes release natural particles that seed clouds and bring rain back to a parched landscape.

But Leslie Copperband of Prairie Oasis Farm says rebuilding damaged soil takes time.

It's a long-term proposition.

It's not like plant a bunch of trees and next year you're going to have rain clouds over your farm.

It is going to take years to bring that soil life back.

Corporations sometimes greenwash consumers by putting deceptive recycling labels on plastic products to make buyers think they're eco-friendly.

Now, Congress is considering the Tracking Plastic Act to standardize what counts as recycled.

It could reduce misleading labels, but Kirstie Pesci with Just Zero would rather have folks get beyond synthetics.

We have to abandon plastic recycling entirely and move towards reusable materials instead that we can refill and actually recycle.

Think recycling is a newfangled notion?

250 years ago, American patriot Paul Revere melted down copper and iron to make horseshoes and armaments.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.