High Plains Public Radio

The ongoing drought in Kansas isn’t just parching crops and putting stress on drinking water supplies. It’s also hurting wildlife as the Kansas wetlands that normally act as vital pit stops for migrating birds dry up.

Thanks to decades of conservation efforts, Hays has become the California of Kansas — a place where thinking about water use is a way of life. For now, it’s an outlier. But as climate change brings drier, hotter weather to Kansas, more cities may have to follow a similar path.

How bad is the Kansas drought? Among the most severe in recorded history. But some other years were more extreme.

As Kansans prepare to vote on the future of abortion, rural western Kansas offers a preview of what life with an abortion ban might eventually look like for the rest of the state.

More than 2,000 cattle carcasses were put in landfill piles or pits after dying in the southwest Kansas heat. But those are not prohibited or unexpected methods of livestock disposal.

For small towns with dwindling populations and shrinking tax bases, luring travelers to stop and spend a few dollars is a matter of community survival. Some turn to quirky roadside tourist attractions. And the community pride these offbeat sites generate can be just as valuable as the money they bring in.

Emergency workers in Kansas are understandably concerned about their potential exposure to the coronavirus, especially as more COVID-19 cases are confirmed in their communities. Rural EMS agencies are already stretched thin and their emergency plans have been upended by the growing pandemic.

The state of Kansas is leading an effort to create a system for tracing deadly diseases in live cattle.

Two years after closing an office in Garden City, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency announced this week it’s coming back to town. The agency’s new setup comes at a time when methamphetamine seizures are on the rise in southwest Kansas.

A North Dakota farmer championed the idea of cover crops — plants that would be considered weeds in many other contexts — as robust plants for his cattle to graze on. A federal farm program now offers farmers in 67 flooded Kansas counties from $30 to $45 an acre to put down such cover crops.