The Rural Poor

Alone on the Range? The Great Plains make up one fifth of the United States area and yet only four percent of its population and that number is shrinking. Due to a mass exodus of the areas youth, new ideas of "mega-farming", and a broad feeling of pessimism, many American heartland communities face the prospect of becoming rural ghost towns and the American dream of a rural middle class society threatened. However, those who are staying or coming back to the United States Frontier are learning the need to reinvent themselves in technology, tourism and specialty farming. The plight of the rural poor on the next On Point.

Guests:

Laurent Belsie, Christian Science Monitor staff reporter
and Author of the special four-part series in entitled "Alone on the Range"

Chuck Hassebrook, Executive Director for the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska

Gil Alexander, Third generation farmer and currently the only full time farmer working in Nicodemus, Kansas, where more than a century ago, freed slaves from Kentucky created the largest exclusively African American settlement west of the Mississippi River

Phyllis Bell, 70 year resident of Lebanon, Kansas and Managing Editor of the Lebanon Times