"When Reed Cammack hears the first meadowlark of spring, he knows his family has made it through another cold, snowy winter on the western South Dakota prairie. Nothing’s better, he says, than getting up at sunrise as the birds light up the area with song."

"The Texas ranch where Gilda Jackson trains and sells horses has been plagued by grasshoppers this year, a problem that only gets worse when the hatch quickens in times of heat and drought."

"A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of The Marion County Record." "The search of Marion County Record’s office led to the seizure of computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors."

"Conservationists are working to preserve eastern Montana’s intact prairie and return its assemblage of native wildlife."

"The chief meteorologist of a television news station in Iowa said this week that he was leaving his job to start a career in science, citing in large part the post-traumatic stress disorder that he said he had suffered after he was threatened last year over his on-air coverage of climate change."

"Iowa continues to lead the nation in the number of regulatory violations committed by puppy mills."

"Craig Schaunaman, who farms thousands of acres, has been invested in the ethanol industry since its early days and even served on the board of an ethanol plant. But a carbon-capture pipeline supported by dozens of ethanol plants would cross his land, and he’s against it, even though ethanol officials say the pipeline is crucial to the future viability of the industry.
 

"All barge traffic will be halted across a wide swath of the Upper Mississippi River for weeks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday, as record winter snowfall in the upper Midwest is now melting and flooding into waterways."