News from rural America.

Rural Appalachia is being eyed for massive AI centers, but locals are pushing back, some farmers say government payments meant to ease tariff burdens won't cover their losses and rural communities explore novel ways to support home-based childcare. 

TRANSCRIPT

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

Minnesota's rural physicians are aging, with a third of them likely to retire in the next five years.

That's led the University of Minnesota Medical School to try something different.

Instead of asking rural students to travel to an urban area for training, they brought the medical school to the countryside.

Dean Chris Fallert says their new mid-state campus rural students learn to be doctors in the kind of community where they could end up practicing.

Our campus is centered in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which is around 60,000 or so.

Fellert says the wave of retirements will magnify an existing physician shortage and erode access to care.

This is the time to be able to invest in systems and in people that are motivated to serve rural communities.

The In neighboring Wisconsin, a grassroots effort is reimagining intergenerational health care.

Folks in Walworth County are working on the Nursery to Nursing Home Plan to turn a vacant wing of a nursing home into a combined childcare and senior living space.

Sherry Stenig with Generations United says knocking down barriers that are unintentionally put up between younger and older people creates a wealth of benefits.

In terms of educational outcomes, well-being, physical, mental health.

Nearly 2,700 kids in the county don't have stable childcare.

Maddie Sweetman with the Groundswell Collective says the proposal tries to address that and a lack of senior services.

There's this loneliness in living in a rural community with an aging population that has harsh winters.

What a beautiful way to sort of bring these two vulnerable communities together.

On Montana's Northern Cheyenne Reservation, a buffalo restoration program is tapping solar power to grow operations and to feed the hungry.

Ilana Newman paid a visit.

Buffalo are the keystone species of the Northern Plains and important in Northern Cheyenne history.

But today, the tribe suffers from food insecurity.

Brandon Small runs the reservation's buffalo program and donates meat to tribal members.

And there's a lot of people on the reservation that never ate buffalo before.

A lot of them right now, they don't even get a actual meal, besides a microwave meal.

I want to try to change that.

For more capacity to process buffalo meat and to grow the herd, a solar array was installed by Indigenized Energy, a non-profit focused on energy independence.

Founder Cody Two Bears helps tribes develop long-term strategies for renewable power.

There are buffalo in the middle of nowhere.

There's no transmission lines that go out there.

And it would cost them millions of dollars to get electrical lines out there, so we did an off-grid project.

I'm Ilana Newman.

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

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.