Colorado Malting Company tests out malting grains in the experimental malt shed, a former dairy barn where owner Jason Cody malted his first batch of Colorado beer.
How does a new craft brewer stand apart from the pack? A few have hitched their brewery onto the local food bandwagon, sourcing the ingredients that form beer’s DNA straight from the fields around them.
Each spring, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission recruits volunteers to assit with a two-week effort to catch and count pallid sturgeon.
Credit Grant Gerlock / Harvest Public Media
Thad Huenemann of Nebraska Game and Parks steers his boat down the Missouri River with Nebraska City, Neb. in the background.
Credit Grant Gerlock / Harvest Public Media
The pallid sturgeon is sometimes called a modern dinorsaur. Fossils show its ancestors were in fact alive at the time of the dinosaurs.
Credit Grant Gerlock / Harvest Public Media
A pallid sturgeon swims in a holding tank with a smaller shovelnose sturgeon. The pallid was declared endangered in 1990.
Credit Grant Gerlock / Harvest Public Media
Scott Luedtke of Lincoln, Neb., weighs a Pallid Sturgeon just pulled from the Missouri River. Wild pallids must be large enough for reproduction to be part of the restocking effort.
Credit Grant Gerlcok / Harvest Public Media
A tissue sample is taken from a potentially wild pallid sturgeon and stored for DNA testing.
The volunteer crew members pulled on their life jackets and climbed into a flat-bottomed aluminum boat at a ramp near Nebraska City, Neb. They came out early on a cold, gray April morning hoping to catch an endangered pallid sturgeon.
Kendra Short (center) works with students on a dance number at her studio in Belleville, Kan. Short and her husband Shannon have applied for the Rural Opportunity Zone program in Republic County, and are building a house.
When the Homestead Act of 1862 made land in the Great Plains virtually free, people rushed in to settle rural Kansas. But 150 years later, the dust has truly settled. Between 2000 and 2010, more than half of Kansas counties declined in population — many by 10 percent or more.
Maybe it was your offbeat neighbor cooing at his gardenias; maybe your grandmother analyzed baseball with her cucumbers. It seems a bit silly, but researchers say farmers should maybe take notice.
