KANSAS CITY, Kan. (KCTV) – Now that physical tollbooths are a thing of the past for Kansas, drivers may be more susceptible to scams claiming they have unpaid digital tolls.
In these texts, scammers will claim to be toll collectors and inform unsuspecting commuters that they owe money for recent travels. The links they provide can install malware, share sensitive information or send money to the scammers.
With the Kansas Turnpike Authority (KTA) converting to cashless tolling on July 1, 2024, anyone traveling through Kansas might be at risk of falling for one of these scams.
Getting started raising poultry is both exciting and rewarding in many ways. If you’re a hobby farmer or a beginner, an important key to health and growth is making sure they’re being raised in the ideal conditions. This article will dive into the essentials of poultry brooders and heating plates as well as the importance of proper nutrition, including vitamins and minerals, and how they play a part in you raising healthy baby chicks.
Creating a Safe and Warm Environment: Chick Brooders or Heating Plates
A brooder is an enclosed space that can be heated to provide a ‘safe space’ for chicks, who can stay warm in it until they grow feathers and no longer need such a carefully controlled artificial environment. In the first weeks of their lives, chicks are highly vulnerable and sensitive to things that can interfere with their normal functions: a well designed brooder is made to keep them snug, dry and protected from drafts.
When you set up the brooder, consider using high-quality materials so that it’s durable, actually holds temperature and has easy access to maintain and clean. Those are key to preventing disease. The same thing is true of ventilation.
For those looking for reliable options, Hatching Time chick brooders cater to the needs of both small-scale and large-scale poultry keepers. These stackable brooders are designed to provide a controlled environment for your chicks. Notably, Hatching Time brooders come equipped with built-in space heaters on each level, ensuring that the chicks receive consistent warmth throughout the brooding period.
Heating plates are a newer option for a brooder setup. Heating plates are used inside a tub, bin, or enclosure to create a warm space that mimics the natural warmth provided by a mother hen, promoting better sleep and natural behaviors in chicks. Adjustable heating plates for chicks also offer great advantages such as:
Safety: Heating plates significantly reduce the risk of fire hazards compared to heat lamps. They provide a safe and consistent heat source that chicks can snuggle under.
Energy Efficiency: Powered by an electric heating system, the plates are energy-efficient reducing the electricity, yet not reducing the warmth that’s created for the chicks, meaning that the system remains efficient.Available as different sizes to suit varying brooder sizes.
Adjustable Height: Heating plates are designed to be adjustable, depending on the different growth stages of the growing chicks, so that at all stages the chicks are maintained at a comfortable distance from the heat.
Check out these heating plates from Hatching Time that are safe, energy efficient and will provide consistent heat for your chicks within your chosen brooder set up.
Essential Nutrition: Food, Vitamins, and Minerals
Proper nutrition is necessary for a healthy chick, and helps support healthy growth. This growth is essential because growing baby chicks are especially prone to disease, so strong nutrition helps to develop a fully functional immune system, giving the young birds the best possible start. There are several aspects of chick nutrition worth highlighting.
Starter Feed: Use a high-quality starter feed made for chicks with a good balance of protein, fats and carbohydrates. Starter feed needs to have at least 18-20% protein content to promote fast growth. High-quality starter feeds also contain natural amino acids which promote healthy growth in muscle development.
Fresh, Clean Water: Chicks should have free access to fresh, clean water at all times Ensure the chicks receive plenty of water, by keeping the correct watering system, this ensures they receive their required amount of water for optimal health.
Grit: When chicks begin eating more solid foods, providing grit helps them break down the food in their gizzard. Providing grit is especially important when introducing your chicks to grains and other new solid foods.
While dietary balance is crucial, some vitamins and minerals are especially important in chick development and long-term health. Here are a few of them:
Vitamin A: Vitamin A is great for developing healthy skin and mucous membranes. It also supports eye health and a deficiency can lead to poor eyesight, being vulnerable to infections and poor skin health.
Vitamin D: Normal bone growth and optimal calcium absorption is boosted with a Vitamin D supplement. Vitamin D deficiencies can also result in rickets in chicks. Exposing the chick to more sunlight will increase Vitamin D production in the chick, but supplementary Vitamin D is usually given too.
Vitamin E: As an antioxidant, vitamin E protects against cellular damage. It also stimulates the growth of the chick’s immune system and aids in muscle growth and development. Deficiency leads to depressed muscle development and weakened or suppressed immune reaction.
Calcium and Phosphorus: The developing bones of the chicks need calcium, and while they do have traces of it from their eggs, they need more. Add a small amount of phosphorus to their meals to support this mineral. Start early so that they can grow strong bones that will support egg formation later in life.
Iron: Iron is used by red blood cells to pass oxygen throughout the body. If there’s not enough iron, chicks can become anemic. This will slow their growth and development. Making sure there’s enough iron in a chick’s diet will give the bird a healthy circulatory system so that oxygen is transported properly to the body.
Simply feeding a diet rich in such vitamins and minerals will help you produce very healthy chickens who thrive and reach their full potential.
Best Practices for Raising Chicks
Here are a few more best practices to follow to ensure your chicks will grow into happy backyard birds:
Monitor Health: Always check your chickens often for illness or distress. Behavioral signs can include lethargy, tossed or messy feathers, or unusual poop. Again, looking for things early can be key to preventing disease, and help you keep a healthy, happy flock.
Keep it Clean: Maintain the cleanliness of your brooder and keep it dry. Always remove the wet bedding and waste daily as retention of moisture inside the brooder promotes the growth of fungi and bacteria which might cause respiratory infections in the chicks and other health problems.
Slow Temperature Adjustment: When they get more feathers, adjust your thermometer settings closer to ambient temperatures. Try 5°F (2.8°C) per week as a good rule of thumb.
Socialization: Allow chicks to interact with one another to develop good social behaviors. Socialization is important to reduce stress and for healthy development.
If you want to raise the healthiest and happiest chicks ever, you must start with giving them the correct environment and nutrition. Buy a good quality chicken brooder with a heat lamp or heating plates (safe heating plates in a chicken brooder setup). Above all, give them nutritious food and vitamins and mineral supplements to actively make them as healthy as they can be.
To get the highest sugar content possible, allow melons to ripen completely on the vine. Color is a common indicator of ripeness for cantaloupes, watermelons and honeydews. Other signs vary among the varieties.
Cantaloupes will easily separate from the vine when it’s time to harvest. If you have to twist to get the melon to detach from the vine it is not fully ripe. The skin should begin to yellow in contrast to the solid green of immature fruit. There should be a musky fragrance and the end of the fruit opposite where the vine attaches should be soft.
Watermelons change from green-white to yellow and the glossy coat turns dull when
they are ripe. The tendril where the fruit attaches to the vine will turn black. Cut the fruit
from the vine leaving about two inches of the tendril attached to the fruit.
Honeydews do not easily separate from the vine when ripe. When the fruit changes
from pale green to light yellow and the end of the fruit opposite the vine attachment is
soft it is time to harvest. There will also be a sweet aroma from a ripe honeydew.
After harvest, cantaloupe can be stored in the refrigerator for two weeks. Watermelons
can be stored at room temperature for one week or in 50-60 degrees F for two to three
weeks. Honeydews can be stored for two weeks at 50 degrees F.
Tomatoes are the most popular vegetable grown in Kansas. And that’s because they can be used in so many different ways — sliced fresh, in salads, made into salsa, spaghetti sauce, and much more! But, what’s the best time to pick them?
Everyone wants to know “when should I pick my tomatoes?” And, although we all like to see them in this beautiful dark, red color, we really don’t need to wait that long. And sometimes we can actually get into trouble while waiting too long to pick our tomatoes. Once the tomatoes starts to show a little blush of color we can go ahead and pick that tomato, take it into the house, and ripen it on the counter or tabletop and it will go ahead and continue this beautiful red color.
If we wait too long, we might actually run into some problems that we can avoid. Like cracking, which is a very common problem. It’s caused when there’s so much water going into the tomato that the skin actually splits. We can try to remedy that with using mulch to try to keep the soil moisture even, and by providing regular,even watering. We can even see cracking sometimes after a really heavy rain.
Another problem is blossom end rot, and you can see it here. It looks like a dark, sunken leathery patch, and this too can be caused by problems with watering.
Sometimes when we leave tomatoes on the vine during extremely hot weather, they may turn kind of a gaudy orange color instead of the pretty red color that we like. This is because at temperatures over ninety five degrees, that red pigment doesn’t develop. And that’s another good reason to let your tomatoes ripen in the house where it’s a cooler temperature, so we get a nice red color.
You do want to let them fully develop that beautiful red color before you refrigerate them. Once you put the tomatoes into the refrigerator, that stops the ripening process. If you have a lot of tomatoes, you can go ahead and either can or freeze them, to use in the winter months. There’s so many things that you can do with frozen and canned tomatoes.
If you have questions on tips about growing or preserving tomatoes, you can also contact your local extension office.
This feature story prepared with Evelyn Neier, Kansas State University Research and Extension Youth Specialist. Produced by the Department of Communications at Kansas State University. For more information, visit our website at: http://www.kansasgreenyards.org
A landmark federal staffing mandate has prompted fierce disagreement between resident advocates and the nursing home industry.
The call came late on a cold night in February, from the Overland Park, Kansas, nursing home where Georann Whitman’s mom was living.
“They said that they found her on the floor,” Whitman said. “She had gotten up in the middle of the night, and had fallen.”
Whitman’s 86-year-old mom, Ann Collins, had dementia. She had moved into the memory care facility a month prior after the cost of round-the-clock care by home health aides became untenable.
She broke her left hip in the fall. After surgery, her doctors ordered that she not put weight on it while it healed. But Collins kept forgetting. And despite the facility’s relatively typical staffing levels, Whitman alleges it didn’t have sufficient staffing to properly supervise her.
“They expected her to push the call button if she needed anything,” Whitman recalled from her home in Spring Hill, Kansas. “Well, she didn’t remember to push the call button. She didn’t remember how the call button works.”
Whitman hopes experiences like her family’s will become less common due to a landmark new federal mandate that establishes the first national staffing minimum for nursing homes. But the new rules, slated to take effect over the next few years, have spurred widespread disagreement. Nursing home owners describe them as extreme, warning they could force some facilities out of business. And, even though advocates welcomed the new mandate, they say it’s far more lenient than they wanted.
A week after Collins’ first fall, she fell again — this time, breaking her right hip. Doctors performed another surgery and reiterated that she needed to stay in bed. Back at the nursing home, Whitman said she pleaded with the facility’s administrators to do more to prevent her from falling.
But a few weeks later, Collins fell a third time. Then a fourth time, and then a fifth. During the last fall, she hit her head and was rushed to the emergency room. With each subsequent fall — all within a two-month stretch — Whitman said her mom’s physical and cognitive decline accelerated.
She hesitated to file a formal complaint against the nursing home because she feared staff might retaliate against her mother.
“But after she busted her head open, I called the state,” Whitman said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
She said she filed a second complaint after she witnessed a staff member — in a rush and apparently unaware of the doctors’ orders — force her mom to walk to another room, despite Whitman’s urging to check her medical chart.
“She argued with me, ‘I don’t have time to check the chart. Why don’t you let me do my job?’” Whitman said.
“When my mom came back, she was in tears.”
State regulators investigated and determined that the facility failed to ensure Collins maintained her non-weight-bearing status, putting her at risk for injury and pain.
The nursing home’s administrators did not respond to requests for comment. The Kansas News Service is not naming the home because Collins’ experience is relatively commonplace in Kansas, and because the facility’s current staffing ratios would exceed the new federal minimums.
After the incident, Whitman said, her mother’s condition quickly deteriorated. Collins was moved in May to a hospice facility, where she soon died.
“You’re sacrificing financially so that somebody else can be the caregiver,” Whitman said of the nursing home system. “At the very least, you should expect that they’re going to be safe.”
Nursing home operators resist
The Biden administration finalized its new federal staffing mandate this spring. Once it takes effect, nursing homes must provide at least 3.48 hours of daily nursing care for each resident — nearly double the current minimum set by Kansas regulators. They must have a registered nurse on duty 24/7. Facilities in urban areas have two years to comply; those in rural areas have three.
Fewer than 40% of Kansas nursing homes currently meet the new requirements, according to an analysis by the health research organization KFF.
There’s been fierce pushback: from politicians, like U.S. Sens. Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran, Kansas Republicans who are fighting the mandate in Congress, and the state’s Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who urged federal officials to delay its implementation.
But the response has been fiercest from the nursing home industry, which is seeking to block the new mandate in court. In a federal lawsuit, the American Health Care Association describes regulators’ actions as “a baffling and unexplained departure” from the past, and the new standards as “impossible” to meet.
In Kansas, nursing home operators say the problem is rooted in an acute lack of health care workers.
“We have had severe workforce shortages in long-term care for well over a decade. This mandate does not magically make that not true,” said Rachel Monger, president of the not-for-profit trade group LeadingAge Kansas. The group’s national affiliate has joined the federal lawsuit challenging the rules.
“We do not have the people — and the money to pay people — in our system, currently, to meet the mandate,” she added.
As part of the mandate, facilities in areas with workforce shortages can ask for exemptions, and federal officials predict around a fourth of facilities will receive them. The Biden administration has also pledged to invest $75 million in getting more nurses into nursing homes.
But industry groups say it’s insufficient.
Linda MowBray, president and CEO of the Kansas Health Care Association, said the mandate could force homes to shutter or reduce how many residents they accept.
“That’s where residents could be put at risk,” she said. “They would not have a bed to go to if they were needing this type of care.”
Critics of the new rules also say they could hit rural facilities particularly hard, making it even more difficult for rural communities to access long-term care close to home. It’s unclear how true that is. A recent national analysis found rural homes are actually slightly more likely than their urban counterparts to staff at levels that would meet the new requirements.
‘Invisible people’
Advocates say understaffing frequently translates into neglect, and the new mandate falls short of what many had called for. They hoped the minimum of 3.48 daily care hours would be set closer to the 4.1 — the amount determined to be needed in a seminal 2001 study funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Camille Russell, who was the Kansas long-term care ombudsman for three years until she departed earlier this month, said she’s lost count of the number of times she’s heard from families about nursing home residents falling due to scarce supervision.
“It is, in large part, due to a lack of staffing,” Russell said.
In a recent survey studying the human costs of understaffing by the advocacy group National Consumer Voice, 87% of residents polled said understaffing affects them every day or several times per week. Over half said staff are frequently too busy to administer their medications and meals on time.
“I call us ‘the invisible people,’ because that’s what it feels like,” Sharon Wallace, a nursing home resident in New York, said in a panel organized by the advocacy group. “We’re stuck in our rooms. We’re out of sight, out of mind.”
Advocates have long called for more stringent and better-enforced rules for the nursing home industry, which they describe as an underregulated “wild west” of the health care sector. Nursing home owners have, largely, fought their proposals, including an attempt in Kansas last year to reduce involuntary discharges of residents.
“We have people who have become literal billionaires in this industry,” Russell said. “Of course they don’t want to shell out more of their profits on labor.”
Russell worries some facilities could try to reduce the financial cost of the new rules by reducing their housekeeping staff and asking medical staff to take on more housekeeping duties.
Sam Brooks, director of public policy for National Consumer Voice, said the industry’s workforce issues are rooted in low wages and difficult working conditions that steer many would-be employees to other parts of the health care system.
“It’s not necessarily a lack of people to do the jobs,” Brooks said. “It’s the job quality itself.”
Financial questions
The debate has revealed diverging economic narratives.
Nursing home operators say hiring to the required level will devastate an industry that already operates under razor-thin margins. Nationally, around half of nursing homes claim to lose money each year in annual reports to regulators.
Kansas industry groups point to a report by LeadingAge Kansas that says at least 57 of the state’s long-term care facilities have closed or reduced their services since the start of the pandemic. The report estimates the new staffing mandate will cost facilities an extra $35.72 in labor expenditures per resident, per day.
But some economists and advocates say there’s more to the story. In recent years, private equity investors have increasingly bought up nursing homes across the country. Their ownership is associated with lower staffing and poorer quality, and in Kansas, their facilities are more likely to be flagged by regulators for persistent compliance problems.
“There’s a reason why this group of people are coming in and buying facilities,” said Dan Goodman, president of the advocacy group Kansas Advocates for Better Care. “They’re seeing an opportunity here.”
Three of the country’s largest nursing home chains have paid out nearly $650 million to their executives and shareholders in combined dividends, stock buybacks and salaries in recent years, according to a group of Democratic lawmakers criticizing opposition to the new mandate.
One analysis of Illinois data found nursing homes there have hidden around two-thirds of their profits from state regulators by “tunneling” money through commonly owned businesses.
For instance, a nursing home’s owners might sell the facility’s building to a real estate company that they also own — and then charge the nursing home an exorbitantly high rent. The nursing home could then tell regulators they’re losing money due to skyrocketing rent costs, even if its owners are pocketing the money.
“The industry line has been that nursing homes are extremely unprofitable, with an average profit margin somewhere in the 0.5% range,” said Andrew Olenski, an assistant professor at Lehigh University who co-authored the paper. “What our study shows is that, actually, the average profit margin is quite a bit higher than that.”
Olenski said profits vary significantly from facility to facility, and it’s possible that many homes lose money without engaging in tunneling. Still, he said, the practice makes it difficult for regulators to accurately gauge the industry’s financial circumstances.
Political uncertainty
Advocates say the new staffing mandate won’t solve the problem of nursing home neglect, but it could force the worst offenders to improve their quality — or close their doors.
Russell, the former Kansas ombudsman, said it shouldn’t be controversial to require facilities entrusted with caring for the state’s most vulnerable people to meet minimum standards. If a nursing home has repeatedly endangered residents, she said it might be preferable for it to close.
“We’d be better off to quit making false promises to people,” she said.
Still, there’s mounting uncertainty about whether the staffing mandate will take effect as scheduled. Some experts say the industry groups challenging the requirement may be buoyed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upending the Chevron deference legal precedent, which curtails the power of federal regulators. Others say it’s unclear if the mandate will hold if Republicans gain control of the White House or U.S. Senate this fall.
Rose Conlon reports on health for KMUW and the Kansas News Service. ksnewsservice.org.
