News from rural America.

Illinois residents say data centers should be regulated, but lawmakers haven’t acted, a farm group wants voters to back candidates who understand rural America, health advocates encourage rural men to visit their doctor and a 12-state concert tour is celebrating rural roots.

TRANSCRIPT

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

The nation's rural communities are asking for help navigating data center development.

One survey found that Illinois has 115 operating facilities, with another 67 proposed.

Seven out of ten state residents say they support oversight of data centers, but proposed regulatory legislation, the Illinois Power Act, hasn't made it through the state's General Assembly yet.

Its sponsor, State Representative Robin Gable, says lawmakers are still learning the issues.

When you first put any big issue on the table, it takes a while to get these passed.

It doesn't usually happen the first year.

Spiking electric bills are adding to the affordability crisis for the nation's consumers, but Congress has been slow to balance that against the tech boom.

Jackson Morris is with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

States are much further along in the legislative and regulatory debates around what are the potential impacts and what are the potential solutions.

Midterm elections are five months away, and a farm action group wants voters to back candidates who understand rural issues, especially the need for domestically grown food.

Farm Action Fund President Joe Maxwell says increased production costs, low commodity prices, and tariffs on exports and imported farm equipment are making life hard for small farmers. 63 farmers a day are going out of business and consumers in our communities and in metropolitan regions can't afford their food.

Maxwell argues the biggest producers don't do much to feed the nation, since what's grown by most foreign-owned companies doesn't stay here.

He says we actually run an agricultural trade deficit.

We're importing more and more higher-valued fruits and vegetables, food-type crops, and we're trying to export our way out with lower-valued feed and fuel crops.

Research shows rural men face poorer health and shorter lives than their urban peers, often from not getting regular checkups.

Tracy Warner with the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network cites high costs and reduced access, Plus, the way rural men have been conditioned to be self-reliant, making them less likely to see a doctor.

That is something that they never saw their fathers do or their grandfathers do.

They just keep going.

It's only when there is something that's very severe that we see them seeking care.

Warner says more high-risk occupations add to that lack of preventive care to make the high rates of chronic disease especially dangerous.

From Decatur, Georgia to the West Coast via the heartland, the 12-state Backroads Music Tour is celebrating rural roots.

Matt Hildreth leads the group Rural Organizing and encourages everyone to attend their observance of the nation's 250th anniversary.

And really celebrate the tradition that Americans have of banding together as communities and neighbors.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.