News from rural America.

Rural America is becoming more racially diverse, but getting rid of language barriers is still a challenge, coal miners with black lung get federal help, farmers are bracing for another trade war and President Jimmy Carter elevated the humble peanut.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Diversifications coming to rural America, but local governments often only communicate in English because they lack the capacity for translation.

In remote Elko, Nevada, the non-English speaking populations risen to nearly one in five.

KFF health news reporter, Jasmine Orozco Rodriguez, says like a lot of states, Nevada requires and funds language access, but the law doesn't apply to smaller counties.

There are local language access laws in different municipalities across the country, but most of those are based in more urban centers.

She says only communicating in English can be a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

And as it did during the pandemic, hurt public health and emergency services.

If their local governments were not providing that information in languages other than English, then it wasn't reaching some of those people.

A new federal rule aims to stop coal companies from dodging their obligations to miners with black lung.

A self-insurance loophole meant coal companies would often declare bankruptcy and stop paying health and disability benefits.

Then payments come from the badly overburdened federal black lung disability trust fund.

Brendan Mucklin-Bates is with the Appalachian Citizens Law Center.

The trust fund that exists currently was not necessarily set up in a way to accommodate this corporate shedding of healthcare liabilities.

The Labor Department rule now requires the companies to cover their full liabilities upfront and requires a yearly review.

America's farmers are watching to see if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on promises to slap huge tariffs on foreign goods.

The National Corn Growers Association says a trade war with China could slash corn and soybean exports by millions of tons.

And ag industry consultant Ben Palin says instability and conflict are bad for farms.

I just don't think that you can have a coherent and consistent policy for agriculture if you go from one crisis to another.

In Trump's first term, farmers hit by the trade war got emergency aid.

But with Washington now looking for budget cuts, Palin says Congress may need to switch to finding new markets for farmers trying to grow their way out of the problem.

I think farmers are very good at production.

It's just part of our DNA.

We want to produce, produce, produce.

As a presidential candidate in 1976, the late Jimmy Carter was razzed for being a peanut farmer.

But the humble peanut's no joke.

It's a $2 billion crop in Georgia where Carter started at age five making a dollar a day selling them to locals.

Georgia grows half of U.S. peanuts, but states as far west as New Mexico also contribute.

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

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.