The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
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It’s no secret that students coming out of our high schools lack knowledge of history and geography. Is it poorly taught, does the curriculum matter to school boards, maybe students themselves just don’t like it, or is there some other reason not publicly known. Regardless, we often lack this knowledge and when we become adults and move onto college and the professional world, we should at least have some kind of knowledge of history and geography. Just to give you an example here’s a quiz....
In last week’s article we discussed how shortages in the trades are making it difficult for businesses to carry out good customer service. But it isn’t just with electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Just about every industry; wholesale, retail, government, schools and military all have shortages in personnel. It’s even hard to find enough baseball coaches right now. Just this morning, there was a news segment about a severe shortage of air traffic controllers with as many as 3,000 set to so...
In the past several months we’ve had a lot of work done on our house and greenhouse. New kitchen cabi-nets, some electrical rewiring in the greenhouse and house and new plumbing in the kitchen. It’s all but finished now but it brings to mind how critical the trades are and how short they are of personnel. We were lucky to get skilled people who had been here before. But that was easier said than done. And when each of them was here to take care of their respective part of our house, each one...
Believe it or not, there are people out there who still don’t know what’s causing the “mysterious” death of honeybees. I thought this was old news, but apparently not. For a time, that was the case. Nobody knew what was killing honeybees. But research in France during the 1990s proved that a class of chemicals called neonicanoids was the culprit. In 1999, France began banning neonicanoids. There are seven chemicals known as neonicanoids. They include imidacloprid, acetamiprid, thiaclo...
On May 22, Gov. Doug Burgum announced the Pembina Gorge State Recreation Area will be developed and become North Dakota’s 14th state park. A total of $6 million in funding for this venture has been secured by the North Dakota Parks & Recreation Department during the 2023 legislative session. A matching $2 million will come from a federal grant. The park, just west of Walhalla in both Pembina and Cavalier counties, is a sight to behold. It starts at the Canadian border and runs in a bit of a s...
Back in the 1960s, the United States Department of Agriculture produced a map of the nation with a number of hardiness zones to help guide gardeners and landscapers with better planting advice. However, those early maps don’t reflect the same zones as today’s maps. There are no doubt, warmer, albeit slightly, patterns that are moving farther north. In fact, when you take North Dakota into account, there have been some major changes since 1990. It’s the same with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which...
Often times when I’m involved with my radio hobby of DXing, I’ll run across a radio station I’d never heard of before. When that happens, I look up the distance between my location and the radio tower. In so doing, I’ve come to realize that we are closer to many places than we realize. I’m of course, using my home location, which is in Carpio, a small town in Ward County northwest of Minot. So, if you live in Wahpeton and read this, obviously the respective distances will be far different...
It was recently announced that two more North Dakota newspapers have closed for an indefinite amount of time. They are the New Town News and Mountrail County Record in Parshall. That brings the recent number of closures to six in what seems to be a stunning trend. First, it was the Metigoshe Mirror, then the Walhalla Mountaineer, the Dunn County Herald in Killdeer, the Cavalier County Republican in Langdon and now the two Mountrail County newspapers. Thus far, there hasn’t been an official w...
Last week we summarized several ghost towns across the state. This week we’ll switch it up and take a look at North Dakota’s 10 newest communities. Six of them are either suburbs of Fargo or are nearby. Four are independent communities in western North Dakota. 1.) Oxbow 1988 – This is clearly the newest community in North Dakota. It was incorporated as a city in 1988 and sits 15 miles south of Fargo in Cass County. The 2020 population of Oxbow was 381, which is up 75 since the 2010 Census. 2.) R...
If you’ve ever read a book called “Ghosts of North Dakota,” there’s one common theme throughout the publication. It’s about ghost towns in North Dakota, but nearly every community written about still exists. There are real ghost towns in North Dakota. It’s just that finding history about them is not always easy or plentiful. But there are ways to find out about some places that may have thrived during territorial days and today are nothing more than a memory. Newspaper archives at the North Dako...
There’s a new movie showing in North Dakota theaters that was filmed here in the state. It’s called “End of the Rope,” and is about a farm family in McKenzie County that mysteriously disappears. Evidence begins to surface that a young farmhand of the missing family is responsible. And while the sheriff and the state’s attorney begin an investigation, a vigilante group decides to take justice into its own hands. The movie is set in 1931 in Schafer, the McKenzie County seat before Watford C...
Two weeks ago while I was watching huge chunks of ice pass by and the Des Lacs River quickly rise to flood stage, I saw a fur-bearing animal on the water trying to swim upstream. I was able to get some pictures of it, but in using an iPhone, you don’t have the option of changing lenses and the optic zoom on the phone is basically useless. My first impression was that it was an otter. And in the process of putting that and several other pictures of the flooding on Facebook, some of my friends c...
When looking at farm and ranch statistics from the USDA Census of Agriculture, a person could take all day picking apart the various numbers, crops, livestock and even ag processing. There are farms themselves, which in 2017 totaled 26,374 that included 39.3 million acres. The average size of a North Dakota farm was 1,492 acres with the median size at 564 acres. We had 10,568 farms that exceeded 12,000 acres; 3,184 were from 500 to 999 acres; 4,549 were listed between 180 and 499 acres; 4,988...
It seems that every time we see information about North Dakota agriculture, it’s about the 11 crops that the Ag Department maintains as No. 1 in the nation. In one sense it paints a good picture for us, but in another it’s deceiving because anyone who farms or knows someone who farms, knows North Dakota is far more diverse than that. What about those crops that are No. 3 or No. 6, or even No. 10 in the nation. If you dig deep into the United States Census of Agriculture, you’ll find that even...
Last week’s article was about a unique recycling of wood from grain elevators. This week it’s closer to home, maybe even in your own back yard. There are vacant buildings in all 53 counties in North Dakota. Just drive around sometime and see it for yourself. Some of those buildings are in such bad shape, it’s a wonder they still exist. But they do and you have to wonder why more people aren’t recycling the lumber they could get out of those structures. Just to give you an example, in 2009 my...
There’s an environmental phenomenon going on next door in Saskatchewan that is nothing short of unique. It’s hard work, but the financial rewards are apparently endless. A company called ABMT Solutions dismantles old grain elevators, then uses the recycled wood for environmentally-friendly projects. Alvin Herman, a 75-year-old farmer from Milden, Saskatchewan is the man who is behind the grain-elevator recycling trend. And just to clarify, recycled wood has been a “thing” for many years....
Anyone who is a gardener in North Dakota should consider attending the North Dakota Farmers Market and Growers Association local foods conference May 4 and 5 at Dakota College in Bottineau. Each year the conference is geared toward better educating gardeners about a myriad of subjects regarding growing, harvesting and having a better display at farmers markets to increase profit and food safety. It’s also about networking, and that is the main reason I go every year, no matter where it is in N...
Anyone who travels U.S. Highway 52 anywhere between Portal to Minot and beyond is fully aware of the number of semi-trailers that are coming from western Canada. I’ve written about this in the past and before retiring, sometimes counted those trucks to have statistics to back up the articles. The last time I did that was December 2019. Since the first of this year, however, there seems to be quite an uptick in the number of semis. It used to be a fascination to me that so many from western C...
According to the Centre of Research & Analysis of Migration in London, approximately 19 million Ukrainians have fled the country as of Feb. 13. However, nearly 10 million of them have returned over the past year. The exodus for at least 8 million are other countries in Europe, mostly Poland, while the United States has taken in 220,000, Canada 132,000, Australia 4,000 and New Zealand 4,000. Ironically, more than 2 million have fled to Russia. Here in North Dakota the number is approximately...
Ever since a recent Monday night football game in Cincinnati when Damar Hamlin collapsed and went into cardiac arrest, we’ve been seeing news segments of the team of first responders, doctors and nurses who worked a miracle to keep a 24-year-old from dying on the field. That’s all good and well. They absolutely deserve recognition because of life saving measures. This isn’t something easy like buttering toast or taking out the trash. Saving a life is a difficult and often traumatic exper...
Well folks, it took 50 years, but North Dakota now has a three-class high school basketball system. The North Dakota High School Activities Association has now approved the starting a third class next fall. Advocates, mostly from the smaller communities in the state, have fought for this since Class C went away in 1963. But the state’s population dynamic has changed dramatically since then and it was time ramp up a third class. This time, however, instead of Class C, the new class will be C...
These stories about flying saucers just don’t seem to go away. People continue to talk about seeing them or evidence of them all over North Dakota. Numerous people continue to tell me about their experiences with UFOs. They tell me in confidence because they don’t want to be ridiculed. The thing is, these people, many of them in their 70s and 80s, have seen some strange things in the sky, or bizarre evidence that UFOs landed. I’ve covered this topic from time to time. Several years ago infor...
There’s a program in the Canadian Football League called Touchdown Atlantic in which two of the nine teams in the CFL give up one date a season to play a game in Atlantic Canada. It was created because of a strong interest to put an expansion team in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Halifax has wanted a CFL team since the early 1980s when a focus committee created the name Atlantic Schooners. In the past few years, the CFL commissioner has endorsed this plan and the CFL announced that it would indeed p...
Call it climate change, call it a long-term weather cycle, you can even call it a coincidence. We can argue about it all day and make it a political football. But there is no doubt water is becoming a serious issue in the western United States, despite recent heavy rain and snow in California. This drought phenomenon has been discussed, on record, here in North Dakota, for at least 20 years, but people appear to be disinterested. In 2003, a group of North Dakota and eastern Montana farmers...
Do you suppose there is scientific evidence as to why unusual animals are showing up in parts of North Dakota, or is it pure coincidence? The most obvious of these would be mountain lions, sometimes called cougars or pumas. There was a time not so long ago that any state or federal wildlife officials denied that lions were roaming around the state. Back in my Minot Daily News days, someone called me to Garrison to show me mountain lions paw prints in the snow. I took numerous photographs and...
