A 5-gallon bucket of carrots, “unwashed and dirty,” and three ice cream pails of chokecherries.
“That’s how my business got started,” says Diane Schmidt, recalling her first sales attempt at the Mandan Farmers Market nearly 40 years ago.
Schmidt was a single mom at the time. She’d haul kids and carrots to the farmers market on Saturday mornings. She can still picture her young boys, in 1986, sitting on the curb while Mom made sales.
“I don’t know that we could have did it without her,” says Corey Hart, a Bowdon area rancher who in 2010 desired to have a local meat processing facility in his community.
Many wouldn’t have thought it could be done. Period.
Bowdon’s population was 127 in 2010. The project faced challenges. A lack of people and capital, but not a lack of heart.
If the community of Bowdon wanted it bad enough, Lori Capouch was willing to try.
The electric industry is in a state of transition. In the mid-2000s, a shift away from fossil-fuel generation toward renewables began taking shape. The green energy conversation has dominated the industry for several decades. Consumers have more interest in where and how their power is produced. Policy, regulation and private investment capital continue to step on the accelerator toward a lower carbon future.
But, another critical conversation has emerged in recent years – it’s message ringing louder and louder as extreme weather events test the nation’s electric grid.
“Hey, girls. Hey, girls,” Al Gustin gently calls to the cows during morning chores, reassuring them in the presence of strangers holding a camera, notepad and pen.
The cows recognize his voice. The people do, too.
For 45 years, the retired farm broadcaster was the first welcomed guest in homes and on farms across North Dakota as he delivered his trusted morning ag news. And in January, Gustin completed his 50th year writing his monthly column, “Farm Byline,” in North Dakota Living.
Gustin stops to pat 12C, a black Gelbvieh he owns.
Whoever said “rain is a good thing” wasn’t referencing late December rain in North Dakota. Christmas Day rain blanketed southeastern North Dakota in a sheet of ice, which caused major damage to the electric system and left some North Dakotans without power for 11 days.
Electric cooperatives described it as “the worst ice storm since 1997.” Dakota Valley and Cass County electric cooperatives were hit hardest by the storm, while KEM, Mor-Gran-Sou, Nodak and Northern Plains electric cooperative members also experienced outages.
Pat Traynor believes he lives in “the most generous part of the planet.” Since 2008, he has witnessed hundreds of thousands of generous donors give $165 million to more than 500 local charities in primarily North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota.