News from rural America.

From electric oyster farming in Maine, to Jewish descendants reviving a historic farming settlement in New Jersey and the resurgence of the Cherokee language in North Carolina, the Daily Yonder looks back at 2025.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Over the past year, the Yonder Report has been your source for rural news across the country.

Here are a few of our favorite feature stories from 2025.

On Maine's rural coast, oyster farming is going electric.

When the founder of Maine Ocean Farms starts his new all-electric work boat, the only sound is a quiet hum.

The early leather zero emissions vehicle replaced one with a loud gas engine that polluted the air and water.

Reducing noise and reducing on-site emissions is a goal of not only improving the workplace, but also improving our potential impact on the environment around us.

In northern New Mexico, indigenous pueblos, National Park staff and volunteers are working to preserve a 300-year-old adobe church in the Pecos National Historic Park.

Pecos Mission has no roof and only three walls.

Park employees maintain it and nearby stone structures led by Mason Tyler Walters.

They'll be exposed to the elements will eventually just melt into the ground.

That's what's at risk.

The volunteers working on the restoration project say the church is alive with cultural and spiritual significance.

Cherokee is an endangered language, but you'd never know listening to students at North Carolina's New Kittiwa Academy.

The Cherokee language came under threat late 20th century after native children were sent to boarding schools for forced assimilation.

For 20 years, the school has run Cherokee immersion, preschool through sixth grade.

Dr. Hartwell Francis is their curriculum director.

I guess you can think about it as guarding treasure.

A language is a community's greatest cultural creation, and it has wisdom packed into it in different ways.

In Colorado, Monta Vista is replacing two miles of irrigation ditch with an underground water pipe and over it, a scenic trail that connects to its outdoor attractions.

The project, the Lariat Ditch Trail, is supported by San Luis Valley Great Outdoors, led by director Mick Daniel.

By making it more livable for the people who live there, tourism will be a very pleasant side effect, not a bad side effect.

The trail, supported by a 2022 federal grant, will connect downtown to neighborhoods, the high school and local features.

Descendants of a historic Jewish farming settlement are safeguarding its legacy.

In 1882, Jewish families immigrated from the Russian Empire to Salem County, New Jersey and formed a colony called Alliance.

William Levin and his wife, Malia, started a non-profit to rebuild that farming community.

We thought maybe we could do something Jewish and creative and revive perhaps the spirit of the Jewish agrarian community that once thrived in South New Jersey.

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

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.