News from rural America.

Residents in Colorado's rural communities face challenges to recycling, climate change and Oregon's megadrought are worrying firefighters, and a farm advocacy group says corporate greed is behind high food prices in Montana.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Cities often have easy recycling, but it can be far more complicated in rural communities.

Cortez, Colorado has a free curbside pickup program, but folks in the rest of Montezuma County have to drive to drop off recycling.

Landfill manager Mel Jarman says challenges with recycling include low volume, long shipping and contamination.

And if it's so contaminated that we can't at least break even or make a little bit, then we can't do it.

After being processed at the landfill, plastics get sent to Georgia and California, cardboard and electronic waste to Oklahoma, shipping that costs thousands.

Heasy Simpson with Four Corners Recycling Initiative hopes new incentives could bring more businesses to the area that use recycled materials.

I love where I live and I don't wanna see it all turn into a landfill.

Rural Oregon has been using this same approach to fight wildfires for a hundred years, but Julia Tilson reports, climate change is causing some local firefighters to worry about their ability to fight future fires.

Oregon's mega drought means conditions are drier now than any time in the past thousand years.

Douglas County District Fire Warden, Patrick Scripp, says he's seen how fires have grown bigger and more intense during his decades-long career.

In this era of fire, we've seen more acres burned in our district in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years combined.

Timber cutting is a huge part of industry in Southwest Oregon.

Coos Forest Protective Association District Manager, Tyler McCarty, says private landowners have worked hand in hand with local firefighters for a century to keep their forests and economy protected.

But now he says their resources are strained.

We're operating a system and a funding model that doesn't support fires that we're seeing today.

I'm Julia Tilton.

Montana groceries cost over 5 percent more than the national average, and one group blames corporate greed.

Joe Maxwell with Farm Action says food companies are price gouging on meat and poultry, keeping prices artificially inflated by still using the excuse of pandemic-related supply chain issues.

One thing we wanna be very clear on is, is that the consumer knows it's not the farmer.

The farmer's getting squeezed just as much as the consumer.

The food corporations blame bird flu and pandemic plant closures for a tripling of egg prices.

So Farm Action asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.

Maxwell says the supplies don't justify the prices and that corporations have near monopoly power.

They've got that control over the farmer, not unlike oil companies have over oil fields.

They now have that control because there's very few buyers of farmer's commodities.

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

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.