Baltimore-based Holly Poultry is building a brand-new, USDA-inspected poultry processing plant that will bring 100 new jobs to that city once the facility is operational in January 2017.  The 37,500-square-foot plant will allow Holly — a further processor of poultry products and a wholesale distributor of poultry, pork, beef and other refrigerated products — to separate its processing business from its wholesale commodity business. [node:read-more:link]

Stevens County ranchers are using billboards to raise awareness about public lands issues. The Stevens County Cattlemen are advertising with a billboard on Highway 395 south of Colville, Wash. The billboard depicts the message “Public Lands: Log it, graze it or watch it burn.” A billboard featuring the message “Wilderness: public land of no use — no logging, chainsaws, grazing, mining, bikes, wheelchairs and ATVs,” was located on the highway in Arden, Wash., earlier this year. The group first used the billboards in 2015. [node:read-more:link]

Ferry County commissioners unanimously passed a resolution Friday authorizing the sheriff’s office to kill the remaining nine members of a wolf pack in the northeastern Washington county, if state wildlife officials don’t resume shooting wolves.  “That pack of wolves needs to be gone,” Commissioner Mike Blankenship said. “I feel the sheriff has that power and that obligation as much as he would with a wild dog out there.” The Department of Fish and Wildlife halted the search Thursday for the Profanity Peak pack 13 days after shooting two adult female wolves from a helicopter. [node:read-more:link]

One key to understanding current political reporting is that many national reporters seem to think that any area that is not within a major U.S. city is rural. Which leads to an aside: Isn’t it interesting how this data is always pitched as rural versus urban. A better description is that the nation’s huge cities are voting very differently from everyone else.  The NPR reporter runs down the differences between major cities and the rest of the country – major cities are more mixed racially, for example, and people there on average have more education. [node:read-more:link]

The overall gap between Internet use in rural and urban areas has remained relatively consistent for the past two decades. Since 1998, rural people have used the Internet at a rate that is 6 to 9 points lower than urban residents. Lower levels of Internet usage are not uniform across different segments of the rural population. [node:read-more:link]

In this summer of catastrophic floods – first in West Virginia in late June and now in Louisiana – scores of small communities will face the daunting task of digging out and trying to start over. For one inundated West Virginia town, help came from down the road, across the country, and next door. And a good bit of that help came from folks who once called Richwood, West Virginia, home. Townspeople rallied, and a state official stepped in briefly to lead until the mayor-elect, Bob Henry Baber, could take over. [node:read-more:link]

Amazon’s secret Project X, along with supporting photos and site blueprints, appears to no longer be a secret. Last week Geekwire reported on the construction in Seattle of what it believes to be a new grocery concept where shoppers can pre-order online, or from a tablet in-store, and pick up their groceries at this brick and mortar store. This follows reports of simialr facilities being built in the Bay Area. [node:read-more:link]

A US District Court judge denied a motion by St. Louis-based Nestle Purina Petcare Company Inc. to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company deceptively marketed the company’s “Beggin’ Strips bacon flavor” pet treats as being made mostly out of bacon. [node:read-more:link]

Picture a steady breeze blowing through the leaves of a tree. Now imagine these leaves could do more than simply churn in the current of air—what if they could capture the wind and transform it into renewable energy? Last December, two “wind trees”—or arbres à vent—quietly churned in a plaza in Paris, as world leaders met for the historic climate talks at the Le Bourget conference center nearby. [node:read-more:link]

It was supposed to be the largest wind farm in North America, with 1,000 turbines spinning above 320,000 acres of southern Wyoming. But after investing more than $50 million and nearly a decade seeking approval to build a wind farm on public lands, the Power Company of Wyoming’s landmark project is still tied up in required scrutiny of its environmental impact.  "We understood that this is a complex process," said the company’s vice president Rocanne Perruso. "We did understand that it was going to be several years. We did not anticipate nine."  The Wyoming project is hardly an outlier. [node:read-more:link]