The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
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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...
It’s an excuse I’ve been dreaming of: A reason to NOT mow my lawn. A “No Mow May” movement is afoot to nurture our bee population for a good reason: bees are incredibly important to our own survival.a According to Bee City USA, an initiative of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, bees are highly important pollinators whose busy work enables the creation of one third of the food and drink we consume. Here’s how bees work: They are drawn to plants for their sweet nectar, which the...
Where did the month of April go? That’s what I find myself wondering. So much for April showers. May we please get May flowers anyway? Surely the April snow had enough moisture in it to help them bloom. The next day that I’ll wake up in North Dakota is Monday, May 1, the publication date of this newspaper. I have sticky notes all over my MacBook and more on my desk, to remind me of all the things I must finish before we leave for the NASP Western National Archery Tournament in Utah. As I pre...
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...
“Junior, this year to prepare for ‘Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day’ I want to teach you about all the taxes that you’ll have to pay as a working adult.” “What are taxes, Dad?” “Taxes are what the government will take out of your paycheck, and will tack onto almost everything you will purchase, to fund lots and lots of programs, Junior — many of which are unnecessary.” “Unnecessary, Dad?” “Junior, when our country was founded in 1776, our founders believed in limited government and th...
We said goodbye to the Golden Stratus last week. The 2005 Dodge Stratus that was supposed to last through all three teenage drivers in our household was hauled away to the scrapyard. When I started working in New Rockford again, my husband and I told the kids that the Stratus would be their car when they got their licenses. We’ve made many repairs to it over the years, and I even backed into it with our pickup once. I joked several times that it was a lemon, and that’s probably true considering...
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...
My car is currently in hospice. I’m trying to keep it comfortable and provide a reasonable amount of care, but I’ve accepted that it’s probably approaching the end of its life. With the expenses of two daughters in college and one in the prom dresses – driver’s ed – manicures – cell phones – Starbucks throes of high school, we need to keep our geriatric family vehicle alive for as long as possible. My car is paid-for, which means, of course, that it has been steadily disintegrating since the day...
A good friend of mine, some 50 years ago, was a basketball coach for a team I covered for my newspaper. Having just won an important district game over a tall and talented opponent, I told him, “Your boys did a great job last Saturday night.” (His tallest of 12 team members was 5’10”; the opponents had a much taller team.) The coach replied, “You gotta’ have a little luck, too.” Likewise, while playing fast-pitch softball, our team played in a 16-team league at Harvey. We qualified for...
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...
Regarding the controversy over school lunch funding in North Dakota: it makes me physically sick when I hear about children whose family hasn’t paid the lunch bill, and thus are given a cheap meal different than the rest. No child should be humiliated that way! I have long held the belief that North Dakota, which is the most diverse agricultural state in the nation, could be a model for school lunch programs. We could show the rest of the world that the best way to feed our children is to use the very best food – grown locally. Gate to the Pla...
“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them,” writes author Margaret Mitchell. I second that, and I will add blizzards to the list, especially after the winter we’ve had in good ole NoDak. Tax Day is April 18, and this year it’s a doozy. The IRS changed the W-2 form a couple of years ago, and since then many of us have been trying to crack the code that tells us exactly how many extra dollars to have deducted from each paycheck to avoid paying a boatload...
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...
I will qualify for Medicare coverage in five years and, much to my surprise, I can’t wait to get government health coverage – because my current coverage is pricey. I recently finished a consulting assignment, which provided me full health benefits. To maintain my health insurance policy through Cobra, I must pay $750 a month. I also have to cover the first $3,300 of costs before full coverage kicks in. That means that if I go to the hospital with a bad flu – which I did for the first time in my...
It’s City Government Week. In the Transcript we are running essays written by third graders at New Rockford-Sheyenne School. The topic is “If I Were Mayor” and each student had the opportunity to write about what makes their city great and what they would do if they were mayor for a day. In honor of City Government Week, I decided to write the same essay and print it here as my column. So, here it is, folks! If I were mayor, I’d never hold meetings on Wednesday nights or Thursday morning...
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....
IQs have dropped for the first time in American history, and the experts aren’t quite sure why. According to Neuroscience News, a new Northwestern University study finds that our average IQ scores have decreased in three out of four cognitive measures. The study found that “scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies) and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period .…” The only IQ measure to incr...
It’s officially spring. Well, at least that’s what the calendar says. We observed the Spring Equinox on Monday at 4:24 p.m., in the midst of piles of snow and a temperature below the freezing mark. At least the sun was out in all its glory, blinding me as I made the short trek from New Rockford to Carrington and back home. Little more than 24 hours later, our area got yet another round of snow, and with it came “challenging travel conditions,” in the words of the meteorologists tasked with gi...
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...
When my three semi-grown daughters were young (and since I work in the lucrative world of public education), we’d spend our spring break holidays riding bikes to the park, making dad-sized pillow forts in the living room, and raiding the gift shop at the zoo. Now that two of the girls are in college and one is in high school, those days (and our gift-shop cash) are long gone. This year, I spent most of my spring break competing with my youngest daughter to see who could sleep in the latest w...
The American workforce shortage has been covered extensively since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, which literally brought the U.S. and global economies to a standstill. Ever since, workforce shortages are still impacting every industry despite significant economic growth – and agriculture is no exception. Here in central North Dakota, where agriculture is the life blood of the local economy, local businesses and operations are struggling to find help. “Labor is a huge, huge thing for any sector...
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...
Along with identifying as “Swifties,” ignoring the reported Chinese threat of bad dancing posed by TikTok, and pretending that plant-based meat is actually edible, many young people in America are engaging in another fascinating trend – not driving. According to recent surveys, around 20 percent fewer teens of driving age are getting their driver’s licenses as compared to the glorious 1980s. Much to the relief of my insurance premiums, our youngest daughter, who recently turned 16, is one of...
I got my annual Girl Scout cookie fix last Friday. One of my favorite two Girl Scouts, my niece Megan, showed up just before supper time to make her pitch. I was happy to take a full case (and a couple extra boxes) off her hands in support of a good cause. Now, a few days later, as I munched on a Tagalong while trying to come up with a topic for this column, I got an idea. Personality tests are popular these days, particularly in work settings. Companies want to know what motivates a potential...
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...
