Voice
A small-engine mechanic in Friendship, Wisconsin (population 700), working a one-man shop on the 40 acres three generations of his family have held. He hunts, follows the Packers, rereads Wendell Berry every winter, and keeps a twelve-year notebook of ice-out and deer-rut dates that shows the climate shifting. He writes on what corporate consolidation has done to small-town rural America — from inside the working-class life that used to be the middle class and is now, as he puts it, what's left.
Senate Republicans are sending farm country into the Super El Niño with the fields bare. The UN weather office says this is the strongest El Niño in seventy years, set to carry into 2027, and the World Meteorological Organization expects it to intensify through the winter. The heaviest rains are forecast across the southern half of the country. Up here, the question isn't…
2026-10-12 · 6 MIN READThe UK government caps energy bills and abandons the households off the grid. I write this from a county where the heat arrives on a truck. Nobody in Friendship is on a gas line. We heat with propane, and with electricity off the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative — the largest member-owned rural electric co-op in Wisconsin, headquartered a few miles from my shop — and when…
2026-10-12 · 5 MIN READAmerica's largest freight broker, C.H. Robinson, said Monday it is buying its rival RXO in a $5.8 billion stock-and-cash deal. The combined company will move $17.4 billion in domestic transportation revenue a year — nearly 14 percent of…
2026-10-08 · 5 MIN READAustralia's coal industry ships the coal overseas and calls the smoke someone else's problem. This week Australia's High Court ruled 3-2 that the smoke is part of the project. The diesel pump at the co-op in Friendship is where this…
2026-10-07 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump is sacrificing global food security to play host at his own property. I read Michael Jacobs's column in the Guardian on the bench Tuesday night, with the Adams County Times-Reporter folded underneath it, and what stopped me…
2026-10-05 · 5 MIN READAidan Struve will pay $18,000 to put fuel in his equipment this year. Last year it was $11,500. He is 23. He farms roughly 500 acres of corn, soybeans, alfalfa and oats in Woodward, Iowa — seven tractors, two semis, a combine harvester. To make up the difference he is skipping maintenance repairs on the equipment, hoping nothing breaks as harvest season begins. He has cut back…
2026-10-04 · 7 MIN READThe refineries broke, and Adams County is paying the bill at the pump. Last week I stood at the diesel rack at the co-op on the edge of Friendship and watched the number roll past what it was in June. Down the road, Curt Voss of the Town of Rome has four tractors and two combines turning soybeans under and roughly 200 gallons going out of the truck every working day. He told…
2026-10-03 · 7 MIN READTrump is holding this war open until after the election. Adams County pays for it on Highway 13. I stopped at the co-op Tuesday morning on the way back from the Mead. The sign out front read $5.42 a gallon for on-road diesel. In February…
2026-10-02 · 4 MIN READGoldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley raised their year-end crude forecast to ninety dollars a barrel, and the propane fill at the co-op on Main Street went with them. Sara signs the bills at our house. She asked me last month why…
2026-10-01 · 5 MIN READFarm diesel is up 35 cents a gallon from last October. The propane man quoted Sara's cousin 18 percent more for a winter pre-buy than the contract she signed last year. Neither of those prices moved because of anything happening on…
2026-09-29 · 4 MIN READTrump is draining the public oil reserve to buy a cheaper pump price. The midterms are five weeks out, and the timing is not incidental to that. It is the plan. The delivery that fills the tank behind the elevator off Highway 13 is the…
2026-10-09 · 5 MIN READCanadian governments kept Canada captive to one buyer. I know what a single buyer does to a place. Down at the co-op in Friendship, Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative sets rates based on what Dairyland Power charges, and Dairyland Power…
2026-09-28 · 4 MIN READ
Oil markets are shifting Middle Eastern risk onto Wisconsin households. The number that matters in Adams County is not a trader's chart. It is the next heating bill, the next school-bus contract, the next diesel receipt at the farm supply…
2026-09-25 · 4 MIN READLast week a man in Canberra told a press conference that the rules keeping companies from polluting for free had outlived their usefulness. The EPA in Washington made the same move in September, rolling back every greenhouse gas standard…
2026-09-23 · 6 MIN READA swallowtail butterfly in England is on the red list. Half of Britain's ash trees are projected to die. Chytrid fungus has driven declines in more than 500 amphibian species and pushed 90 to outright extinction. These are not…
2026-09-21 · 8 MIN READFlorida is paying for gene-edited trees while the citrus towns are already gutted. I know what a commodity collapse does to a county from the inside. Wisconsin lost more than 70% of its dairy farms between 1997 and 2022 — from roughly…
2026-09-20 · 4 MIN READCitrus greening nearly killed Florida's orange industry and abandoned half a million acres. I know what a dead grove looks like. On my forty acres in Adams County, a failed patch of trees turns back into brush fast enough to hide the old…
2026-09-19 · 3 MIN READWashington left American wheat farmers to carry the crisis alone. By the time you read this, the wheat still standing in fields south of Beloit will be the wheat that made it. Everything else was lost in July—shriveled by drought, too thin…
2026-09-18 · 5 MIN READTrump and Xi are gambling with rural households to manage a soybean truce. I was at the co-op elevator outside Friendship last week when the talk turned to beans. The men there were not discussing national security or artificial…
2026-09-17 · 4 MIN READGermany turned its state trader into Europe’s gas market. At my bench in Adams County, I know what “fill by date” means. A snowblower that has to run before the first storm does not care whether the carburetor price looks attractive today.…
2026-09-17 · 3 MIN READUK Oil and Gas abandoned Horse Hill after climate rules destroyed its value. I know what a stranded asset looks like because Adams County has been living with them for half a century. The railroad built Adams and then dieselization emptied…
2026-09-16 · 6 MIN READThe Panama Canal Authority is rationing global trade by auction. I know what rationing looks like from the shop floor in Adams County. Three customers need the same carburetor gasket and one distributor has it. The part does not become…
2026-09-15 · 5 MIN READTehran and the Houthis shut oil routes and bill working families. I know what that bill looks like from Adams County. It is the number on the pump before I drive the Silverado to the co-op, the number Sara and I work around at the kitchen…
2026-09-14 · 5 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry is baking the planet to death, and August was the receipt. Last month the planet averaged 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit — 16.96 Celsius — which Copernicus, the European climate service whose record goes back to 1940,…
2026-09-10 · 7 MIN READThe president started a war, is losing the war, and is telling Americans to eat $4.22 gas until after the midterm elections because that is when the political pain of his war becomes his problem instead of yours. Oil crossed $100 a barrel…
2026-09-09 · 5 MIN READGlobal shipping is sacrificing Panama’s drinking water to keep its cargo moving. The article is what I’m reading on the bench Monday night when I should be looking at the parts catalog. The headline in the Adams County Times-Reporter two…
2026-09-08 · 5 MIN READTrump's Iran war is stealing a dollar a gallon from American families. I filled the Silverado at the Cenex south of Adams last Friday for $4.27 on the marquee — the same price it's been running most of August. The Friendship pump was the…
2026-09-07 · 5 MIN READThe gauge on the LP tank behind the shop reads just under a quarter. I called Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative last week to schedule a fill before deer rifle season opens. My brother-in-law's house in Stevens Point heats with the same…
2026-09-06 · 7 MIN READThe food system robs the harvest before the rain stops. Here in Adams County, I know what a busted crop does before it reaches a futures screen. It turns a year into a payment schedule. Seed, fertilizer, fuel, labor, loan interest, and the…
2026-09-03 · 5 MIN READIndia built a solar revolution it cannot move across its own grid. Eleven terawatt-hours of clean electricity generated and then told to stop — because the wires, the batteries, and the switching gear that move power from one place to…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READThe State Department abandoned eighty-five American pilgrims in a Nepali valley to a glacier. The Kailash Journeys agency says four hundred Americans took its pilgrimage tours this year. Every one of them was of Indian origin. The State…
2026-09-01 · 3 MIN READMy neighbor on the south road called last Tuesday to ask why the coop raised his propane surcharge again this winter. I told him it wasn't just propane. I told him about methane — invisible, eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide…
2026-08-31 · 3 MIN READInternational Paper and shipping giants are dismantling the South’s pine economy for cheaper fiber. I know what that kind of disappearance looks like. In Adams County, a mill closing did not remove one employer from one town. It pulled…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration is in advanced talks to take a direct stake in 17 Venezuelan oil-and-gas fields holding roughly 90 billion barrels of proven reserves — nearly twice the entire U.S. reserve base — and the moment Washington signs,…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe trade war that started on Trump's desk is about to land on American cropland — and the weapon Canada is most likely to use next is the one Washington left out of its own tariff list on purpose. Potash. I can see the fertilizer trucks…
2026-08-27 · 5 MIN READWest Point fired its only climate scientist for telling cadets the truth. Out behind the shop last Tuesday morning I watched the fog come off the cranberry marsh on the south side of the section. Forty years ago my uncle Pete used to say…
2026-08-27 · 4 MIN READSaturday morning I was at the locker in Friendship, dropping off half a beef from a neighbor. Ron Watters runs about forty cow-calf pairs on a hundred and sixty acres west of town off County Z — a retired C&NW man who came back to his…
2026-08-26 · 5 MIN READThe Sand Hill mill closed in 2009, the year I graduated from Adams-Friendship High School. The same extractive logic that closed it — a timber economy that pays men with guns when paperwork fails — is what got a 50-year-old Kichwa…
2026-08-25 · 6 MIN READThe federal government is tearing apart wild horse families to feed cattle on public land. The line Robyn Smith gave a reporter at the roundup in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, was "they're living their best life." She was watching through a…
2026-08-21 · 7 MIN READTrump and Steve Pearce are desecrating sacred Pueblo land for oil company profits. Tuesday night I sat at the bench after the shop closed with the BLM's proposed rule open next to the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department's…
2026-08-20 · 6 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry emptied the reservoirs of the American West. I read the wire Tuesday morning on the bench at the shop, with the parts catalog open to a Stihl chainsaw order I needed to call in. A woman named Dianelis Molina Cruz…
2026-08-19 · 5 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry is drying Europe's rivers to keep selling its product. The slough at the back of my forty went dry in late July. I watched it go dry in 2018 and 2020, the worst two years of the last twelve, but this year it went…
2026-08-18 · 5 MIN READMeta is secretly buying Kentucky farmland to fuel AI compute, hiding behind shell companies and NDAs. I read Christopher Mims's Wall Street Journal piece on Delsia Bare and her mother Ida Huddleston at the bench one evening last week, and…
2026-08-16 · 5 MIN READWashington tried to erase the Navajo language it then used to win a war. I live on forty acres in Adams County, Wisconsin, that belonged to the Ho-Chunk people long before there was an Adams County — before there was a Wisconsin, before…
2026-08-14 · 4 MIN READOil markets are taxing Adams County's harvest by holding diesel too expensive to run. I was at the Cenex in Adams last Thursday filling the Silverado — nine gallons of off-road in the tank — and the pump was reading a dollar ten higher…
2026-08-13 · 4 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is heating Europe for profit. I wrote the first ice-out date in my notebook twelve years ago, standing on the bank at Lake Petenwell with a thermos beside me and the same question I still have now: how many times…
2026-08-10 · 5 MIN READTotalEnergies and Eni are selling Europe a new dependence and calling it independence. The first hard freeze in Adams County usually lands in the first week of November. Every year about then I stand in the shed and watch the gauge on the…
2026-08-09 · 5 MIN READTrump restarted a war that fills refiners' pockets at the pump. I watched the diesel price climb at the station on the way to the co-op this week, and I have watched enough fuel spikes to know what one does to a one-man shop in a county…
2026-08-07 · 6 MIN READClimate change is stealing the thin margin Malaysian growers need to survive. I know that margin from Adams County, where a farm can stay busy, productive, and still be one bad season from trouble. The crop is not the whole business. The…
2026-08-06 · 4 MIN READThe logging company is stripping Pacheedaht territory bare. Near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, about 20 forest defenders slept on a gravel logging road. They came in a five-car caravan, slept in tents and the backs of cars, and put one…
2026-08-06 · 5 MIN READAuthorities charged a man with arson in one Spokane wildfire. Three fires near Spokane destroyed about 850 buildings and forced roughly 67,000 people to evacuate after erupting last weekend, according to the Associated Press. No deaths…
2026-08-06 · 4 MIN READHotter weather is driving Spokane families from their homes. At my bench in Adams County, the distance between Washington and Wisconsin is a map distance, not a weather distance. The same heat that dries a western hillside changes the work…
2026-08-05 · 4 MIN READAbout 20 forest defenders camped overnight on a gravel logging road near Port Renfrew, British Columbia. They slept in tents and the backs of cars, parked one truck across the road, and took their positions at 3 a.m. The next morning, a…
2026-08-05 · 8 MIN READTyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef are robbing ranchers and consumers. The beef price story starts with drought, disease and the smallest American cattle inventory since 1951. It does not end there. Eric Gropper runs about 350 breeding…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration drilled border-wall wells without state permission. Here in Adams County, I know what it means when somebody treats groundwater like an empty tank. Our county sits on the Central Sands, where farms, homes, lakes…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READTrump's administration is risking New Mexico ranchers' water for a border wall. Wisconsin has a name for the well that pulls its neighbors dry. It is called a high-capacity well, and the state's Department of Natural Resources has required…
2026-08-03 · 5 MIN READDemocrats are telling people standing in floodwater that the real issue is the price of bread. That is the calculation the consultants made. Don't talk about the weather. Talk about groceries. Don't say "climate." Say "affordability." They…
2026-08-01 · 4 MIN READOPEC and Washington are robbing rural America at the pump. I filled up the truck this morning at the Co-op in Friendship, and the numbers on the pump felt like a gut punch. Diesel had climbed enough to sting — high enough that the total…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is starving the Lumbee Tribe's healthcare after a hundred and thirty-seven years of broken promises. Angie Lowery is forty-four years old. She is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe, and she lives in Lumberton, North…
2026-07-30 · 4 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is poisoning the summer for a generation of kids. Here in Adams County, the air doesn't smell like it used to. The notebook has twelve years of this, and the line doesn't bend back. The seasons are arriving…
2026-07-26 · 5 MIN READThe water shot into the stock tank on a high mesa south of Montrose, and a trickle soaked the dry earth below. Scott Snyder rose from the shade to fasten the hose and stop the spillage. "It's just so much work. I hate dropping any of it,"…
2026-07-25 · 7 MIN READCongress drained the petroleum reserve, and now a Houthi attack will spike diesel prices. I filled up my Silverado at the Co-op on Highway 13 this morning. The diesel pump read $4.19. That is thirty cents higher than it was a month ago,…
2026-07-24 · 6 MIN READThe natural-gas futures are not the story. The heat that moves them is. The Nymex front month sits at $2.928 per million Btu and cannot break above $3, even after a 32-billion-cubic-foot storage build that analysts called "modestly…
2026-07-24 · 4 MIN READA year ago the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court ruled that Black Creek Freedmen are citizens of the Nation. The treaty promised it in 1866. The highest court inside the Nation confirmed it in 2025. Chief David Hill and the Citizenship Board…
2026-07-23 · 4 MIN READTrump and his trade officials are using Canadian dairy farmers as cover for tariffs that will cost American dairy farmers their biggest export customer. That is the move. Here is the math. Canada bought $1.3 billion in American dairy last…
2026-07-23 · 3 MIN READThe smoke hit Friendship on a Tuesday afternoon in early July. I was running the Stihl on a downed birch off County Z when the sky went the color of a dirty dishrag and my eyes started burning. By Wednesday morning the air-quality index…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READThe drillers behind America's energy-dominance story are paying buyers to take their gas. In the Permian Basin — the biggest, most productive oil field the country has ever had — natural gas prices averaged negative $2.19 per million…
2026-07-21 · 7 MIN READThat is what the United Nations said Tuesday. The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report found the daily cost of eating adequately jumped almost a quarter between 2021 and 2025, from $3.44 to $4.28 in…
2026-07-21 · 4 MIN READThe Trump EPA is protecting companies poisoning farmland with toxic sludge. When the farmers asked what to do about it, the agency told them to do their own research. The decision, published this month to the federal register, killed…
2026-07-20 · 4 MIN READDollar Tree does not come to a county like Adams by accident. It comes because the population is low, the median income is low, the labor-force participation is the lowest in the state, and the alternatives have already been killed. It…
2026-07-20 · 6 MIN READThe smoke rolled into Adams County on Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning the sky over Friendship had gone the color of old dishwater and the air smelled like somebody had burned a house two towns over. The thermometer at the shop read…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READTrump drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lose a war on Iran. A 9.6% single-day jump in Brent crude is the kind of price move a small-engine shop in central Wisconsin absorbs in a week. The diesel that runs my Silverado, the…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READFossil fuel companies are burning alive people who never burned their fuel. The Associated Press reported that Banda, India — a northern town that has recorded some of the country's highest temperatures — endures extreme heat at all hours,…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READThe Trump administration is hiding the information that keeps rural households from burning through their savings during a heatwave. I write this from a shop with a window air conditioner that has been running almost continuously since the…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READThe U.S. Department of Justice just opened a federal trial against the Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit, and climate activists are watching for a reason that has nothing to do with Israeli cybersecurity firms. The indictment…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is killing endangered species by changing what the word "harm" means. Let me tell you what the word does on the ground. A red-cockaded woodpecker needs a longleaf pine with a certain age and a certain heart-rot to…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READTrump and the Republican Senate are sacrificing rural Americans to the heat so they can keep cutting corporate taxes. Another heat dome is rolling east across the northern Plains, the Midwest, the Northeast. Chicago at 97 degrees, New York…
2026-07-15 · 4 MIN READ
