In both Minnesota and Nebraska, I’ve often had the impression that small towns look bigger than towns of similar population in South Dakota. Little towns off the Interstates just seem to have more going on in neighboring states than in South Dakota.
Todd Epp gets a similar impression:
In Nebraska, Main Streets often look more alive. Storefronts seem cleaner. Houses appear better kept. Yards look tended. Not everywhere, and not always. Nebraska has empty windows and declining places, too. South Dakota has towns with pride, care, and fight left in them.
But the broader impression holds: Nebraska’s small towns often look healthier than South Dakota’s [Todd Epp, “Nebraska Invests in Rural Towns While South Dakota Leaves Renewal Scattered,” Northern Plains News, 2026.06.09].
Epp notes that population density helps: Nebraska has twice as many people per square mile and six times as many as South Dakota, meaning there are more neighbors (and more wallets) in the next town and the next county to come over for tractor parts or the street dance.
But Epp argues that Nebraska takes small-town development seriously:
Nebraska has made rural prosperity a public project. Rural Prosperity Nebraska, part of Nebraska Extension, presents itself as a statewide community-development effort that has worked with Nebraskans since 2018. Its Nebraska Thriving Index gives rural regions a benchmarking tool across several measures, including education, growth, infrastructure, and quality of life.
…Nebraska media have treated the work as public business, too. A 2025 Nebraska TV segment on Rural Prosperity Nebraska described surveys, steering committees, and local participation as tools for helping communities plan their future. That kind of story matters because rural confidence is social before it becomes economic [Epp, 2026.06.09].
…more seriously than South Dakota does:
SDSU Extension Community Vitality says it helps South Dakotans build stronger communities through learning, coaching, and local change efforts. Dakota Resources works with rural economic-development organizations on leadership, collaboration, and financial capacity. USDA Rural Development South Dakota funds housing, infrastructure, businesses, and community facilities. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development offers business and rural-development tools.
Those efforts deserve credit. They also remain too easy to miss.
Too many rural South Dakotans could drive past these programs without knowing they exist. A council member may not know where to start. A Main Street business owner may not see one visible statewide project aimed at keeping the town alive.
South Dakota’s rural-development language can feel Hank Kimball-adjacent: earnest, circular, and not quite connected to the tractor in the field [Epp, 2026.06.09].
It ain’t easy being small anywhere in rural America. But Epp contends that Nebraska is making more of concerted, coordinated effort than South Dakota to help its small towns survive and thrive.
Republicans in red states are howling because the federal government is buying land to protect it from desertification so groundwater depletion and the absence of public land is draining the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer six and a half times faster than its recharge rate and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates from industrial agriculture.
In 2008 after Nebraska’s 1978 median nitrate level doubled lab tests showed a few municipal wells were exceeding the US Environmental Protection Agency limit for uranium when samples jumped as high as 57 parts per billion. In 2011 one irrigation well just four miles from a municipal water source tested 322 parts per billion of uranium or more than 10 times the legal limit for drinking water set by EPA.
In a 2015 study researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported that 78 percent of groundwater samples from the Ogallala Formation found with unsafe concentrations of uranium were also contaminated with nitrates from farming. Researchers learned that nitrates at levels near the 10-parts-per-million legal limit release uranium into the state’s groundwater, which provides drinking water for 85 percent of Nebraskans.
Towns in Nebraska are stepping up sampling municipal supplies where nitrate levels are still rising but the owners of private wells are not. Jim Pillen, the state’s Republican governor is a major contributor to nitrate impairment but he wants a study that will pin the blame on farmers. Suggesting that irony is not completely dead, wells in the Republican River basin are the most severely threatened by nitrate poisoning.
You know, we have a well and we are just glowing from using it.