A growing chorus of rural leaders agrees that new opportunities are on the horizon for rural America. Economic consolidation and outmigration need not be rural America’s future. The question most rural regions now face is this: How to claim the new opportunities? At root, this question is all...

New approaches to rural policy are badly needed, as past reliance on subsidies and policies focused on a single sector are yielding diminishing results. Fortunately, a new frontier of policy experiments is emerging, and this frontier holds great promise in helping rural regions seize new...

Entrepreneurship is the new focal point for rural development. This was the consensus of 200 rural policy officials and experts who gathered in Kansas City on April 28-29 for the fourth annual rural policy conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Center for the Study of...

The rural economy broke free from the reins of recession in 2004 with an especially strong performance in the farm sector. Net farm income easily surpassed the record high of 2003. And the weakness that plagued the nonfarm rural economy in recent years appears to have been replaced with stronger...