News from rural America.

This week we start out with a report from Madeline de Figueiredo on the ground in Texas about the results of the midterm elections and how rual voters turned out. Then we have a conversation with journalist Astra Lincoln how access to health care has changed with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We hear about a folklife project that shines a light on postal workers and their role in rural communities. Then, we meet author Leah Garcés, who explores the relationship between animal advocates, farmers, and ranchers — and about where they find common ground. Clay Bolt, photographer and the World Wildlife Fund’s Manager of Pollinator Conservation and Great Plains Communications, talks all things pollinators; and Daily Yonder columnist Donna Kallner brings us a story of a tick bite, and what we can do to prepare for next spring. Our featured musician is Julia Keefe, who leads the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio.

Every week we bring you Rural Conversations with National Reach, and I'm looking at the menu today, and it's the same, people.

So much coming at you like a conversation with journalist Astra Lincoln about the one big, beautiful bill act and what that means where she's reporting from, which is the border of Idaho and Oregon.

A folklorist comes in to talk about the importance of rural mail carriers.

Leah Garces, she brings up this phrase, the tyranny of small differences, and she overcomes that for her YouTube show, One Table, between her, an animal activist, and those who rely on animals for farm and ranching.

And Clay Bolts, an incredible photographer, he's with the World Wildlife Fund, and he promotes pollinators as we all should.

Daily Yonder columnist Donna Counter comes in to talk about the non-pollinating tick.

What's the point of the tick?

Well, she has advice on if you find them on you.

And our featured musician this week, Julia Keefe, who leads the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, You can find all this and more on Yonder Radio.

We'll be right back.

Thank you.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, I'm your host, Jared Ewee.

Come on in.

We've got room.

Of course, as per usual, incredible stories today.

Donna Callner, she has some important tick information.

Okay, and I'm talking about T-I-C-Ks, the bug.

Appalachian postal workers, their importance to the lore of this country.

We're going to have that conversation.

Elia Garces is joining us as she bridges between her lifestyle and that of those farmers looking for alternatives to factory farms.

And wow, there's a lot more.

But we need to get into news.

We are recording this the morning after midterms.

Madeline DeFigureto, she has been in Texas.

She is in Texas for the midterms to find out what happened and how.

Can you share with us more the information you have from Texas about the midterms?

I think we all saw some really unexpected and extraordinary outcomes across the country.

And Jared, I want to start by just talking about, you know, the headline here is that James Tolerico won as a Democratic senator in Texas and Gina Hinojosa won as a Democratic governor.

But we also had victories down the ticket when it came to Democrats.

And that's something that I've been hearing over and over from rural voters is that, you know, while there are these national races that we're, you know, we're focused on, there's also county commissioners and judges and attorney generals.

All of these roles were filled by Democrats.

And it looks like it's still too early to call, but they're starting to flip statehouse seats in the Texas legislature.

Rural Texas overall shifted to the left about eight points.

The governor race shifted more than eight points towards the Democrats compared to the last midterms in 2022.

And when we compared the Senate race in 2024, which, you know, a little bit of a caveat there was also a presidential race, we saw that rural Texas shifted 7.5 points towards the Democrats, contributing to James Tellarico's victory.

Big swings, like a 50 plus point swing in some Texas areas.

Tell us about that.

A lot of those big swings came down near the border and in the Rio Grande Valley.

Let's take Brewster County, for example.

It's home to Big Bend National Park, which has been at the center of a lot of controversy over border wall construction.

In 2022, Greg Abbott carried Brewster County by nearly nine points.

And in 2024, Donald Trump carried Brewster County by 13 points.

And Senator Ted Cruz carried it by 10 points.

Yesterday, Gina Inajosa flipped that county, winning by eight points, while James Tallarico won by nearly 10 points.

If you go a little further south, in Star County, which is a majority Hispanic county, Donald Trump won that county by 16 points in 2024.

And Ted Cruz won that county by two points.

Last night, Hinojosa won that county by nearly 50 points and Tellurico by 55 points.

So we're talking margins that are, I mean, truly extraordinary.

Local rural issues mattered, it seems, and maybe the same in Mississippi.

Too close to call right now.

What is happening there?

We're standing here the morning after the election, and it appears that Cologne is winning the Senate race by a margin of 47 votes.

So we're like down into the nitty gritty.

Every vote counts.

Some of the trends that we were seeing in Texas are also happening in rural Mississippi.

For example, in Yolabusha County, Trump won that by a margin of 21 points in 2024.

And now Colom is leading that county by two points with over 95 percent of votes being reported.

And so there is this sway we're seeing, especially in northern and northwestern Mississippi, where it comes to not only a surge in voter turnout, but also a surge in Democratic voter turnout.

Thank you so much, Madeline.

Much to synthesize, much to report.

And we're not going to throw it all at you at once, as next week we will be back with more midterm reporting, and this time seasoned heavily with exactly how data centers played a role.

We'll have that for you on Yonder Radio.

Excited to share more next week.

And now, Astra Lincoln.

She brings us one of the stories of our time, access to health care, and how it has changed with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

For the Daily Yonder, Lincoln reported from the Oregon-Idaho border to show what the changes look like across state lines and what it means for residents who are seeking care.

This story, a tale of two behavioral health systems, or how the state border determines who gets access to mental health care, took you to the Oregon-Idaho border area.

And I want to dig into the implications that you unearthed, but can you give us a bird's eye view of where you were and demonstrate this border geographically?

Sure.

So I was reporting from the Oregon-Idaho border, as you say, which is really just a single contiguous geographic landscape that's split by the Snake River and also the largely arbitrary political border.

So on the Oregon side, you have Ontario, which is the county seat of Malheur County, the second largest and most rural county of Oregon.

And across the way, you have Weezer.

A little further out, you have Payette, Idaho.

Both communities are basically in a health care desert, although Oregon is significantly more impacted because of the way that insurance is delineated according to state lines.

Yeah.

And this is from the one big, beautiful bill act and its cuts.

And why is that?

Oregon stands to lose the most, see the most significant drop in Medicaid enrollment in any state in the nation.

And is that just because it's abnormally high, the enrollment?

The way that the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are being delineated are really different on a state-by-state basis.

And that's because of the different ways that states have handled healthcare policy historically.

So Idaho, for example, has always had one of the lowest Medicaid enrollments in the country.

And that's not because there's less need for health care in Idaho.

It's just because of a different regulatory context.

A lot of states across the country have expanded eligibility for Medicaid, especially during and since the pandemic.

But Idaho has always had a more limited expansion.

Across the border in Oregon, in Malheur County, 50% of residents are currently enrolled in either Medicaid or Medicare.

Among those 50%, 80% of enrollees are actually children.

So Medicaid fills a huge need for younger people, vulnerable people.

Oregon Health Plan administers Medicaid for Oregon state residents.

It has significantly expanded Medicaid eligibility.

And because of that, like you say, there's just a much higher enrollment rate and a much larger swath of people that stand to be cut if the enrollment eligibility changes.

And it is in the process of changing.

As of this June, the Oregon Health Authority announced new eligibility rules that will require people to renew their coverage every six months, whereas historically it's been every two years.

Copays will be introduced as of 2028 for many health care services.

And so they're looking at, yeah, just a huge drop in enrollment.

I'm wondering, A, is the federal government responding and is it adequate if they are?

When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed, one thing that it had included in the text in addition to the sweeping Medicaid cuts was the establishment of this program called the Rural Health Transformation Program, or the RHTP.

And that program sought to distribute special funding to rural areas.

And that was intended to offset the disproportionately high impacts that other portions of the bill would cause in regions that are already facing worse health outcomes.

A lot of and healthcare researchers have suggested that these measures will almost certainly be inadequate to actually offset those impacts.

To date, the RHTP has allocated $50 billion to rural hospitals to be distributed over the next five years, which seems like a lot until you look at the amount that has actually been cut, which is closer to $137 billion.

You say an estimated 338 rural hospitals are expected to close, including three in Idaho and four in Oregon, as well as additional closures among private and specialty clinics located outside of hospitals.

So can you tell us more about the impacts of the closure of these hospitals and clinics?

The impacts are tremendous and well-documented and traumatizing.

They lead to poverty.

They lead to excess death.

And in the context of this article, they also lead to worse behavioral health outcomes.

Looking at Oregon in As clinics close, especially in rural eastern Oregon, a lot of patients are faced with the choice to either terminate their care entirely or to cross the river and receive out-of-pocket treatment in Idaho.

The people who are facing these cuts are making less than double the federal poverty line, or about $33,000, which doesn't leave a lot, if any, excess income to pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket for weekly or biweekly treatment.

Oregon has historically had one of the highest rates of mental health challenges of any state in America, and that is despite hundreds of millions of dollars in state investments.

Despite these investments, Oregon has been ranked the worst state in the nation for mental health for several years, and more than 30 percent of the state's adults live with some form of mental illness.

Speaking of Oregon, they are leaning into universal health care planning.

How serious are they about this?

Okay, so back in 2023, the Oregon state legislature mandated the creation of a universal healthcare governance board, which has basically been tasked with scoping out a policy proposal that could fully fund and implement a single payer healthcare option, which is basically what you see in Europe and Canada.

And that option would cover every resident in the state.

And it's the first really serious effort to establish a single-payer health care system since 2002, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a plan proposed to be a ballot measure.

DailyYonder.com, a tale of two behavioral health systems, or how the state border determines who gets access to mental health care.

Astralinkin, thank you so much for coming on Yonder Radio.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

And just to follow up on that Oregon single-payer health care option, lawmakers should receive the universal health care proposal in December and could vote on the plan in 2027 or refer it to voters as a ballot measure in 2028.

You can read Astra's story at dailyyonder.com slash yonder radio.

Now, Julia Keefe is a Nez Perce jazz vocalist.

She's a band leader.

She's an educator who grew up in Kamea, Idaho on her tribe's reservation before moving to Spokane, Washington.

That was when she was about 11 years old.

Now she lives in Brooklyn and leads the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band.

Today she talks about how important Indigenous people were and still are in big band music.

Oh, rockin' chairs got me Came by my side Your native language, is it called Nez Perce?

Is it also the tribal name?

So the language is actually Nimibutimt.

Okay.

The French fur trappers named us Nez Perce, which means pierced noses, which is something that we never did culturally.

Completely inaccurate, okay.

Completely inaccurate, but we call ourselves the Nimibu, which is the people, And then our language is Nimiiputim, the people's language.

We are a federally recognized tribe as the Nez Perce Indians.

And so from this very deep historical inaccuracy comes these multiple, multiple levels of like legal finality.

Wherever you are, do you feel some weight to correct this through your art or conversation?

Is there any pressure to do that?

It's certainly not like pressure that's put on me from like other people.

It's more like a just like an invitation, I guess.

And that's kind of how I approach the music, too, is like here's a sort of broadening of the scope of our understanding of jazz or American popular music and how indigenous people not only have a part in it, but played an important part in its evolution.

Well, let's talk about this music.

I'm with Julia Keefe, also known as She Calls Out from On High.

Were you called She Calls Out from On High from day one?

No.

So I received my name when I was about 13 or 14.

The name comes from a woman who had owned the allotment of land that is in my family.

And her English name was Julia.

But on the allotment papers, they wrote her Nimipu name, but it was written out, you know, sort of phonetically, Himoye Katsat.

Like my mom was going back in through these documents and trying to find a name for me.

She was like, oh yeah, Himoye Katsat, that like that we named Julia Julia after this ancestor.

We'll give her this ancestor's name.

And then my cousin, who is actually very active in the Nez Perce language program and revitalization efforts, she was going through all of our names and she was like, Himoyekatsit.

That's not right.

That's not accurate.

Someone misspelled or misnamed this woman on the allotment papers.

And she was like, no, Julia, your name is Himyumukatsit.

And that means she calls out from on high.

Was that an awesome moment?

It really was.

Like when she told me, it's like, it means she calls out from on high.

I was like, well, that works out nicely.

Yeah, it does.

Oh, knowing how.

Oh, from where I have found.

Julia Keefe, Indigenous Big Band.

I think a lot of people will be like, oh, well, that's novel. some Native Americans in a big band.

But that's not the case.

You've got receipts because this is historical.

We are part of a very long line of indigenous jazz musicians and indigenous big bands, small jazz ensembles, marching bands that occurred throughout Indian country during the 20th century.

And that was a result of the Indian boarding school experience.

The federal government or churches or the military came in and there was the forced removal of children from their families and their cultures, and they were put into these institutions.

The purpose of that was to create a cultural disconnection.

It was essentially kill the Indian and him to save the man.

And for those who survived that education, they went back to their homelands with this knowledge of Western music, with these Western instruments, and formed marching bands and big bands and jazz ensembles, and some of them, you know, toured their territories.

Talking about this history, Mildred Bailey is on the list of people, these innovators who were Native American and also incorporating big band music.

She became the queen of swing.

Yep.

You know her story well.

Can you share some of that?

Yeah.

So my family, we lived on my tribe's reservation.

I lived in Cammie, Idaho as a kid.

And then when I got to, you know, middle school, high school, we moved up to Spokane, Washington.

And that was when I started studying music in a more like formal way.

And jazz is like the centerpiece of music education in the Inland Northwest.

I loved jazz.

I loved improvising.

I loved singing.

It was just it was the best.

And being the incredibly cool kid that I was in high school, I was reading Bing Crosby's autobiography, as most high school students do, because Bing Crosby grew up in Spokane.

He says in it, like, I was very fortunate to have known the great singer Mildred Bailey early in my life.

And, you know, she had a heart as big as Yankee Stadium and she had all the best records and some of her tunes are still hits.

And so, like, because I had never heard of Mildred Bailey and Bing Crosby was like, she was a big deal.

I started doing a little bit more research, come to find out that she grew up in Spokane.

She was one of the first women to front a big band in the late 1920s, early 1930s.

And she was from the Coeur d'Alene tribe.

That just blew my mind because I had never seen myself reflected in this art form that I loved so very much.

It gave me direction having her there.

It gave me something to talk about in the performances.

Being able to talk about her and celebrate her legacy.

It just gave me purpose.

It allowed me to use music as activism.

And you have a new album.

Talk about this.

Yes.

The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band recorded our first album, Incarnadine. this album you know sonically it's kind of hard to pin down because we're going through the history of jazz in addition to highlighting the work of contemporary jazz musicians so we have some music from Mildred Bailey.

We have music from Jim Pepper.

But then we're also highlighting the work of Delbert Anderson, who's a horn player in the band, who's Diné from Navajo Nation, and Molly Obamsawin, who's Abenaki of Odenak First Nation, and then some of my original work as well.

It really is like one part history, one part protest, one part just sonic celebration.

If somebody were to jump behind you right now and just frighten you, and startle out of you.

What is a thing you would sing?

Can you sing us whatever we're just like?

The thing that leaps out of me at any given moment, it's either like Honeysuckle Rose or Rockin' Chair, but I'll do Rockin' Chair because Rockin' Chair was Mildred Bailey's like signature song.

So old Rockin' Chair's got me, cane by my side.

Fetch me that ginseng for I tan your hide.

Can't get from this cabin.

Ain't going nowhere.

Just sitting here grabbing at the flies around my rocking chair.

That was incredible.

I'm choking up.

Thank you so much.

Julia Keefe.

She calls out from on high and we're happy she's doing it on Yonder Radio.

Thank you so much for coming by.

Thank you so much for having me.

Really appreciate it.

Oh, the rockin' check gets it.

Julia Keefe.

Learn more about all of her projects, her music and career and her story at JuliaKeefe.com.

And that Keefe is K-E-E-F-E dot com.

And now here we are at our first rest stop where children gather around.

We have our first trivia clue.

The answer to this week's trivia question is the largest mountain carving in the world.

We will have more clues on the way, and we're also going to go on a deep dive on postal workers and their importance as we talk to a folklorist next on Yonder Radio.

Thank you.

The Yonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach and something that you would want to reach to you is the information about dealing with ticks.

As a warming climate helps that population spread across the country, Donna Kellner has that advice for you.

But first, if there's anyone who knows their rural community like the back of their hand, it's postal workers.

We're talking about that with Emily Hillier, a folklorist in Berea, Kentucky, who's worked to document rural mail carriers' careers and just how important they are to the places and people they serve.

And we're going to get to the project that she's been working on and its importance.

But first, I got to ask her, share with us the historical significance of Irvine Pratt.

My early interest in documenting rural mail carriers actually came through a Sesame Street video.

It was Appalachian Mailman, and it was part of a series that they did about Appalachian culture.

The Appalachian Mailman originally aired on a 1973 episode of Sesame Street, and it featured a man who delivered mail by horseback.

I'm the mailman.

I deliver mail by horseback.

Deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, the roads is rough.

You can't get through it without walking going horseback.

People wait for me.

They know the days I'm coming and they all glad to see me come get their mail.

Later I learned that the letter carrier featured in the clip was Irvine Pratt.

He was a blacksmith and one of the last mail carriers in Appalachia to deliver by horseback.

And so he delivered an 18 mile route from Pinetop to Hollybush in Knott County, Kentucky.

And he finally retired at age 77 after he was injured after falling from his horse.

But there is now a monument to him in Hyndman in his home county.

I had been aware of it.

I revisited it, you know, as an adult and was interested in what are mail carriers in Appalachia doing today?

What's their occupational culture?

What is their relationship with their communities?

and then definitely interested in how they witness changes in the landscape over time, whether that's weather or development, farm loss, things like that.

And this leads to this project with the Library of Congress.

Tell us about this.

So in 2021, I received an Archie Green Occupational Folklife Fellowship with the American Folklife Center, and that's at the Library of Congress.

And this was for the project Rural Free Delivery, Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia.

So I conducted interviews with about 25 rural mail carriers and clerks in Central Appalachia.

And this is actually the region that birthed the country's first rural free delivery route in 1896.

So that started in Charlestown, West Virginia.

So the project documents their occupational folklore more broadly, but it also focuses on the function of rural postal workers as resources in their community.

And one of those examples is the interview with you and Brian Grimm.

Favorite part of the job, I guess, is knowing that it's something that I'm doing that is beneficial to people on my route.

There's elderly people that they look for their newspaper, and they get excited when they get their newspaper in the mail.

And it feels good knowing that I'm delivering something that they're looking forward to getting.

It feels good knowing that I'm a revered member of the community.

It's been really rewarding being a mailman.

I always have to be good.

Mailman can't never be bad because your car's known everywhere.

That's right.

Tell us, based on these conversations you had with the postal carriers like Brian, tell us about their importance to the community.

Yeah, so regionally about 55% of the population in central Appalachia lives in rural mountainous areas.

And so that is often a place where Wi-Fi is insufficient.

So people really rely on these mail carriers to pay bills or get life-dependent prescription medications, communicate with loved ones, and then also last-mile delivery shipments.

So FedEx and UPS and Amazon often don't deliver the last mile, and they rely on the postal service to do that.

And so many of the rural mail carriers I interviewed are from those communities that they serve, like Brian, and they feel really invested in those communities.

And so I've come to think of them as care workers and sort of guardians of those communities.

So they know when mail starts to pile up in a mailbox.

And that might mean that the elderly person who lives there needs to have a wellness check.

They also see people, if they may have fallen down in their yard or their driveway, they know when the cows got out.

And they're the first reporters of road conditions, too, because they drive the same route every day.

But in turn, customers really take care of them.

So they had stories of customers towing them out of a ditch or plowing a snowy stretch of roads so the mail carrier could get through.

They also had a lot of stories of customers leaving them gifts in the mailbox.

So hot soup in the wintertime, cold water on a hot day.

Is there anything that sticks out to you in these must-be hours and hours of interviews that hit you the importance of their work, not just in delivering mail, but as being a part of the community story?

Yeah.

So, I mean, one, there are a lot of great stories, but one in particular was from Lorna Atwater.

So she was from Berea and she was driving her 75 mile route through the Eastern Kentucky foothills.

And she noticed that the woods behind a customer's house were on fire.

And so she called the fire department and the homeowner, and then she just got out of her car and used their garden hose to wet down the backyard to make sure that it would not spread.

They really have that familiarity with the community.

The fact that she knew who the homeowner was was really important so he could come home.

There's been talk of all kinds of ideas for changing the postal service, like drone delivery.

Obviously, if that happened, they would not be able to put out a fire in the backyard.

That's incredibly symbolic.

Yes, putting out fires is not in most job descriptions, but I I think a lot of people listening are nodding, thinking, oh, no, that it happens.

Thank you, Emily Hilliard, for joining us.

If stories like that don't inspire you to leave a cold bottle of water for your mail carrier on a hot day, I don't know what will.

One, two, one, two, three.

And now we're going to revisit Julia Keefe.

Julia Keefe, indigenous big band here.

And on Yonder Radio, here's her song, Water.

The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band.

Remember, you can find more of her music at JuliaKeefe.com.

Keefe, K-E-E-F-E.com.

A journey worth the digital visit.

What an incredible talent.

And now, Leah Garces is an author and animal advocate.

And she's doing something really impressive that is really needed these days.

Finding common ground.

Leah has a YouTube series called One Table where she challenges the idea that farmers, ranchers, and animal advocates are on opposing sides of issues like factory farming.

We're going to hear a clip from this series later, but we start by talking with Leah about who she is and how she pulled this off.

What you're doing in your One Table series, which is so beautifully produced, so simple, but so powerful, is we're seeing this woman who has written this book, Transformation, and talking about how we can exit factory farming.

And you yourself are a vegan.

And you're here with a hog farmer over lemonade, having a pleasant conversation about how to move forward.

How does one do that?

What is your story?

Yeah, well, my story is my very first job was actually at Save the Manatee Club.

What I realized at that point is you can't really approach problems, especially with animals and then further into food without thinking about the whole system, without thinking about everybody involved.

And when you get into complex systems, you realize people have different views of how to approach complex problems.

And so you can't just railroad your way in and say, it's my way or the highway.

You'll never get anywhere.

I grew up in a really diverse political family, a diverse religious family, a diverse everything family.

So I had to learn to navigate people having different views and being able to sit down at the table anyway.

That's the kind of foundation for the work I'm doing now, which I think matters beyond our food and farming system, but our society in which we are troubled in the way that we feel like we can't talk to people who have different views than us.

We can't find a way forward.

We can't make progress without that.

And my approach is even if we come to different moral or ethical conclusions, There's a lot we can do to make progress and make the world a better place without being totally aligned on the final moral ethical conclusion.

If we look back on ourselves, let's say 200 years ago, we might consider ourselves maybe less sophisticated, more medieval, but we might have been better to our livestock then.

Oh, yes, for sure.

Factory farming only came about after World War II.

And it was an intentional government approach as a result of starvation throughout the country.

So we needed to get calories into society, and that worked.

But we're no longer in that situation.

We have other problems now.

We have a problem where soil is degrading, and we may not have soil in future to produce food.

So why are we wasting it on factory farms?

Why are we being so thoughtless about how we treat the environment, treat animals, and treat our communities?

We're not in the same situation.

Well, I'm watching one table on the airplane yesterday, and I just got this notion that while watching you have these conversations, I was kind of anchored in a simple goodness for the world's most complex problems.

It is a good place to be, people.

You need to sit down at the one table via YouTube and watch these conversations.

Thanks for saying that, Jared.

I am trying to have people focus on the common good between us and steer clear of obsessing over this tyranny of the small differences.

And I feel, especially with food and farming and ending factory farming, we can do so much good.

And that's my hope for the future.

Leah Garces, people, check it out.

One table.

The book is Transformation.

And thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you, Jared.

Thank you for having me.

It was a great conversation.

And here's a clip from her YouTube series, One Table, including a conversation between Leah and Will Harris, a pig farmer in Georgia.

I love guns and I got a gay dollar.

So the Republicans or Democrats want me.

That's OK.

I'm a vegan.

I'm an animal rights activist.

I can't kill animals.

I don't eat them.

Over the last few days, I've been having some really difficult conversations with people who do.

Pig farmers from around my state.

But before you judge, because I know there's a lot of contradictions there, 99% of all farmed animals in this country that are eaten are kept in factory farm settings.

And these farmers have chosen intentionally to go against that, to go against the main system.

They are working on building biodiversity, on healing the land, on having animals live a life worth living.

And we disagree on that last day.

We disagree on who gets to choose whether they live or die.

And that might mean really uncomfortable conversations.

That's important to do.

It won't be easy, but I think it's important to do.

Tell me a little bit about where we are right now.

You are sitting in the middle of downtown Bluffton, Georgia.

We are in the White Oak Pastures dining room.

We built this originally to feed employees.

We've got about 170 employees.

It's nice.

And did you grow up here?

I grew up here, and my dad did, and my granddad did.

So we've been here a long time.

My great-granddad started the farm.

I never wanted to do anything running the farm.

After high school, I went to the University of Georgia, major in animal science.

The brand of livestock rearing they taught was industrial.

Yeah.

So I came home and ran it very industrially for 20 years.

How did you decide?

When did you decide?

What made you decide to change from the industrial system?

The idea of loading 100, 500-pound calves on a double-decker truck, 30 hours on the truck, no food, no water, no rest, I was on top, urinating and defecating, I was on the bottom.

It finally just hit me that this is all right.

And I started...

From an animal welfare perspective?

Animal welfare perspective first.

Yeah.

Later it was the land management perspective, ecological perspective.

You and I have been friends a really long time.

How do you feel about me as a vegan coming to your farm?

Like, what do you think?

I'm really, like, curious.

Why do you...

Sometimes we get into it, but I'm curious.

Like, what do you think about people like me?

You have every right to decide what you will and will not eat.

Yeah.

And if you don't want to eat meat, that's not my business.

Right.

But I really respect how you do things.

And I think if people are going to eat animals, they should eat the animals you raise.

Because they're living their life naturally until that point of death, which they're not choosing.

You're choosing that for them.

I absolutely respect the fact that you would not kill or you don't know.

And I do the war to defend your right and not kill or you don't know.

I'm not trying to convince you that you shouldn't be.

You never have.

That was a segment from One Table with Leah Garces.

You can see the full program on her YouTube channel.

Just go to YouTube and search Leah Garces.

That's Leah with an H and Garces, G-A-R-C-E-S.

It's time for our second trivia clue.

Work on this monumental carving began in 1948, just seven years after work was completed on neighboring Mount Rushmore.

We'll have more clues for those who need it.

That's coming up in your answer.

Also, we're going to talk to someone who, if your child stares at bugs all day, it's okay.

There's a future for them.

And we have proof of that on Yonder Radio. guitar solo guitar solo Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, my name is Jared Ewey.

And if you're not interested in bugs and insects, you clearly haven't met Clay Bolt.

Because he's a photographer and the World Wildlife Fund's manager of Pollinator Conservation and Great Plains Communications.

That is an incredible title, and he's earned it.

He joins us today for a bit of a deep dive into pollinators and what they do for us, how they're doing, and how we can help these important creatures.

I am going to take a big leap here.

I think that at some point in your childhood and maybe many times you were staring at bugs and lost.

Like your mom was yelling at you and you didn't hear anything.

Is this true?

Oh, yeah, that's very true.

And, you know, it's funny because I don't really know.

And I've wondered this many times.

Why was I so attracted to insects as a kid?

Like, why did I find them so fascinating when so many people tend to find insects frightening or gross or whatever?

I was just drawn to them.

I always wanted to take up for the underdog, you know, the species or the people that were being picked on.

Your inner child is so proud of you and what you've become.

I am wondering what you would tell everyone else about why they should be fascinated with bugs.

I mean, one of the things I just like to tell people is like insects are the true survivors.

I mean, they're some of the earliest animals on our planet.

They are way, way beyond us in terms of evolution, in terms of the crazy things that they can do.

But they're also just extraordinarily beautiful.

And that's one of the things I love about macro photography is that, you know, photographing things that are small and blowing them up large so that people can see the details is we are surrounded by incredible beauty.

It doesn't matter if you're in South America or South Carolina.

There is something in your backyard that would absolutely blow your mind if you were able to take the time to look at it.

You are the World Wildlife Fund's manager of pollinator conservation and Great Plains Communication.

Right now, it might seem like we are not doing our best effort to protect pollinators.

Am I right or am I watching too much news?

You're right in that we have a lot of pressure that we've placed on insects of all kinds, wildlife of all kinds.

But insects in particular, and I'll speak specifically about pollinators, are really being impacted by a lot of different factors.

Habitat loss, it's light pollution, pesticides most certainly, and pesticides particularly in row crop agriculture.

I do think that there's an increased awareness of the importance of pollinators, not just honeybees.

Honeybees are super important, but they're not a native species to North America.

They're a domesticated species that was introduced in the 1600s, like cows and chickens.

Our native species that don't have that kind of management, that don't have that opportunity to be bred in captivity, are really being hammered.

And people are starting to understand that, oh, we have 4,000 species of native bee in North America alone.

There's 20,000 in the world.

Those are just bees.

We have pollinating flies, butterflies, other things.

It's starting to become part of the zeitgeist, if you will, particularly when people get more interested in planting native plants in their gardens.

The interest seems to be rising.

How can we all just be better about this?

Well, I think just starting local is really important.

So in our own yards, we've got an addiction to lawns here in the US and nothing wrong with a nice green lawn to hang out in.

But really trying to reduce some of that lawn space and planting flowering plants that grow all the way from spring into the fall is like really important for native pollinators.

Because just like us, you know, they need a balanced diet and they need food throughout their entire life.

They do well in a pesticide-free environment.

You know, a lot of toxic chemicals are not good for anyone really.

But I think when we can, supporting local growers or organic growers who are trying to reduce the number of pesticides they're using.

But I don't want to paint conventional farmers in a bad light.

Farmers are kind of at the mercy of both the seed companies and the pesticide companies.

Really, 100% of non-organic corn comes pre-treated with these pesticides, whether the farmer wants it or not.

And then finally, I think they need places to raise their young, and that means nesting space for pollinators.

And so there is this fear that I want to try to help calm people's nerves about, and that is that, you know, if I invite more native bees into my garden, will I get stung?

Well, the truth of it is, is that of the 20,000 or so species of native bee in the world, over 70% are solitary species.

And what that means is they're not living in this giant colony like honeybees.

They are basically hardworking single mothers out there living in a small, tiny, BB-sized hole in the ground that no one will probably ever see.

And they're too small to stick.

There's not a gang of dangerous pollinators hiding out behind the milkweed ready to ambush you.

That's exactly right.

One of your job titles here is Great Plains Communications.

When you communicate, are you communicating with farmers about options?

We are actually right now in the process of conducting a number of field trials.

We're planting side-by-side treated seeds, and then we are able to access some untreated seeds to show farmers, look, you don't really always need these pesticides.

And so farmers are really actually quite surprised.

Oh my gosh, this grows as well, if not better, than the treated seeds.

I have a great yield, save a little bit of money, and it's helping the native pollinators.

And so we're really trying to build up a coalition of farmers who are like, we want options here.

Right now, WWF has 1.6 million acres enrolled in our program called RSVP, which basically works with ranchers to improve practices, give them the funding they need to improve those practices that helps pollinators, grassland, songbirds, grazing animals, you name it.

And now claybolt.com.

This is your photography and people.

Not that I want you to get distracted at work, but you should look at his photography.

It's from fantastic to phantasmagoric.

And in one of the photos that people talk about when your name comes up, is this true?

You got maybe the first photo of the Wallace giant bee.

It is absolutely true.

It actually got me into the Guinness Book of Records, another childhood dream.

So in 2019, a colleague, Eli Wyman, and I went to a small island in Indonesia called North Maluku.

In the late 1800s, a famous contemporary of Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, discovered this bee.

And it's about from head to tail about the length of my thumb and the wingspan is massive.

And then it was seen again in 1981 by a couple of Americans and then pretty much lost.

And through a very long and winding story, Eli and I basically around 2015 began to hatch this idea that maybe we could go and find it just for fun.

And we were able to track down the original guides that were with those two guys in 1981.

And all of the places we searched, the bees were not there anymore.

We were passing out flyers in the villages.

We were like telling people, hey, have you seen this?

And so we spent about two weeks looking for the species, you know, after five years of planning and all of this kind of work.

It was a hot day.

I was starving.

I had kind of like resigned myself.

Well, we've had this great adventure.

We're not going to find it.

And then at the time, our guide, who has become a very close friend, a guy named Ishwan Majud, saw this small termite mound on the side of a tree.

So these bees were known to live in these active termite mounds and trees.

And he said, what about that?

So Ishwan climbs up the tree.

He was an excellent tree climber.

And he looks in, he jumps down and he says, there's a snake in there.

My friend Eli goes up.

He says, something looks odd here.

And then I go up and I see this weird thing in there moving around.

And it was the bee and it was so massive.

Can you imagine, you know, this kid who grew up in South Carolina, loving insects, finding myself on a red dirt road on the other side of the world, seeing this insect and knowing we did it.

It was like, did I die?

And this is not real. it was an amazing moment.

That's incredible and he is doing the work pollinating the world with the information necessary so that we might protect the bees and the other creatures that make life possible.

This is Clay Bolt World Wildlife Fund's Manager of Pollinator Conservation and Great Plains Communications and it's just been awesome talking to you here on Yonder Radio.

Jared it was a pleasure thank you so much.

You can and honestly should explore Clay Bolt's photography at claybolt.com.

And now for a story about a not-so-nice bug, the tick.

An extra strong El Nino weather pattern is forecast this year, which in Wisconsin probably means a mild winter is coming.

And mild winters always seem to mean more ticks the next year.

Here's how Daily Yonder columnist Donna Kellner is preparing for that.

Here at 45 degrees north, tick season is practically year-round.

Anytime the ground isn't frozen, ticks may be present and looking for a host to feed on.

The autumn surge has us tucking pant legs into our socks, stripping on the porch, and performing tick checks after being outside in the yard and in the woods.

In May, I missed a tick the size of a sesame seed that found its way into the deepest part of the crease at the back of my left knee.

When I woke up scratching, I could feel a tiny bump.

My husband could see then that it was a tick.

He pulled it off for me, taking skin with it.

Since it had been so firmly attached, I saved the tick in a plastic bag marked with the date.

The itchy rash that followed was raised, warm, and grew to the size of a fist at the back of my knee.

But I had no fever or chills, which are common symptoms of tick-borne diseases.

Nowadays, a single prophylactic dose of doxycycline is considered a safe, effective way to reduce the potential for Lyme disease after a high-risk bite, whether or not the characteristic bullseye rash is present.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that and waited too long after the bite for the single-dose protocol.

A week later, I still had swelling, a rash, and so much itching.

So I took my still crawling in the baggie tick and went to the walk-in clinic at our rural county seat.

The physician's assistant who saw me there prescribed a 10-day course of doxycycline.

That, he explained, could help protect against Lyme disease and would also be an appropriate treatment if the rash were from cellulitis, a bacterial infection of the skin.

When I followed up with my primary care physician, we both felt pretty confident that the break in the skin from the tick bite led to the cellulitis rather than a tick-borne disease.

But I learned something from my recent tick bite.

Mice are an important host for the bacteria responsible for illnesses like Lyme and anaplasmosis.

When a tick feeds on an infected mouse, the tick harbors that bacteria, then transmits that bacteria when it feeds on another host, like a dog or a human.

If we could reduce the infection in mice, we might be able to reduce the number of infected ticks and consequently the number of tick-borne infections in people.

So this fall, we're putting tick tubes in our outbuildings.

The tubes are stuffed with nesting material permeated with insecticide, which transfers to the fur of mice.

As someone who has lived in old farmhouses, I can attest that eradicating mice is nearly impossible.

But if it's possible to treat them for infection before it can be transmitted to me or my family next spring, count me in.

In the meantime, if an extra strong El Nino means our ground doesn't stay frozen this winter, we may have to keep stripping on the porch to check for ticks.

This is Donna Kellner from 45 Degrees North for Yonder Radio.

Even if you aren't in Wisconsin, you should be aware of tick risks anyway.

Deer are a big host for ticks in other parts of the country, so please keep an eye out no matter where you are.

And now for our final trivia clue of the week, this monument honors an Oglala Lakota warrior who led successful military campaigns against the United States military, including at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Did you guess it?

The answer is the Crazy Horse Memorial in Custer County, South Dakota.

The project was commissioned by Oglala Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear in 1939 and was originally designed and sculpted by Polish-American artist Korczak Zulkowski.

Today, Zolkowski's descendants continue the project.

Crazy Horse's face is 87 feet tall.

That's completed, and work continues on his outstretched arm and the mane of his horse.

The site also hosts the North American Indian Museum and the Crazy Horse Memorial University.

Crazy Horse is remembered for his defense of Oglala Lakota lands, culture, and customs.

And we've carved yet another hour out of your week for Yonder Radio.

We appreciate you being here.

We're going to stick around with us, chisel, and get to work chipping away on a new episode, which will be right here, wherever you listen to Yonder Radio.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of The Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Iwi.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponver, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merima for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Alana Newman and Will Wright.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach. guitar solo