Wednesday, January 28, 2026
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Corn Chowder

By
Debbie Dance Uhrig
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With the tremendous dip in temperatures it seems only appropriate to feature a hearty soup this week. I chose not to run the broccoli cheese recipe I made this evening for my family. The men at our household gave it a nice thumbs up, so will see about featuring it in the weeks to come. Corn Chowder is one of my favorite soups especially when it’s super cold outside. Compared to my friends back in Lewis County, Missouri I have it pretty easy with weather, just super cold and freezing drizzle.

Let’s jump in and look at several of the ingredients. And, you guessed it, look at how we can personally modify. I think the first subject should be the cheese of choice. Swiss is about the lowest sodium cheese you can consume. However since ‘smoked’ was used there may be additional nitrates and sodium within.

Smoke flavoring may not appeal to every cook. If it doesn’t, eliminate smoked cheese all together. In its place use Farmer’s Cheese or mild cheddar. Actually I was afraid to label the recipe, ‘Smoked Corn Chowder’. Knowing that not everyone enjoys smoked taste, I felt it might keep some from trying the recipe.

I would say 90% of the time I smoke my own cheese for cooking use.

Corn, me oh my, if its summertime and corn season use fresh corn in this dish. Don’t worry about the creamed corn, instead use about 3-4 cups of regular fresh corn, cut from the cob.

Red Peppers/Onions: If you have a garden full of green peppers I wouldn’t hesitate to use them. On the onion I like a sweet white onion, but a finally diced red would be so bad either. The red onion would definitely bring in color.

Dairy: If using half and half is too many calories, return to only milk and no cream. However there will be a taste and creamy difference.

You will notice there is a small amount of salt added to the recipe directly. If you do not use salt free chicken stock it would be best to eliminate the additional salt.

Pepper, you want to use black instead of ground white, go for it!

Kielbasa sausage: I think the recipe is best with kielbasa, but if there’s still a bit of Easter ham hiding out in your deep freezer, this would be a good place to implement. With the kielbasa you will find various flavors, nice particularly if you have people with special dietary needs. For those who like a spicier approach to the soup, you’ll easily find jalapeno kielbasa.

As you approach the slurry, there are two different choices. I like my chowder with some body, but not too much. If you lean the other direction go with the four tablespoons, for the slurry. Phillip, our son, was pulled into the completion of this recipe, and he likes it ‘very’ thick. Because the chowder is so strong on ingredients, I prefer only 3 tablespoons. You call it here!

What’s a slurry? Any time you thicken you use either a wet slurry or a dry slurry. When you make sausage gravy it’s usually a dry slurry. This would be when you work the flour into the meat, before adding the milk.

When I was growing up my mother tended to make very ‘thin’ soups. Any time I made a soup for my dad, after mother’s passing ,he would make comments about it being too thick! It’s so amusing to me how our childhood affects how we develop as adults. I hated the thin soups, so I always filled mine with crackers galore, something my husband, Ervin, continually hounds me about. I also don’t make very many thin soups, except for a nice consume or chicken noodle. All based on my dislike for all the thin soups. I remember my brother Greg asking mom to make chili thick enough a spoon would stand up! She did it too, to please both Greg and myself.

I’ve commented many times about how our eras can affect the way we cook. Parents who experienced the depression, bring so many different things to the kitchen, less sugar in their baked goods, thinner soups, and at my home, no cheese!

Cold weather or not let’s have a great week and enjoy the presence of those around us. Simply yours, The Covered Dish.

Corn Chowder

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup – 1 cup finely chopped onion

1 red pepper, chopped small

2-3 stalks celery, finely chopped, (optional)

1 can regular corn, drained

1 lb. kielbasa or ham of your choice

(Cut kielbasa rounds in half, then slice-)

3 cups chicken stock, (salt-free was used)

3 large potatoes

3 tablespoons dry parsley

1/2 teaspoon thyme

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground white pepper

1 can creamed corn

1 cup milk

1 1/2 cups half and half

1 cup smoked Swiss cheese, cut into small cubes

3-4 tablespoons flour

1/2 cup additional half and half for wet slurry

Serves 6 portions as a main entree or 12 as the first course.

Saute onion, red pepper and optional celery in butter. When tender add corn and lightly saute. Stir in sliced kielbasa (chunks of ham may be substituted) and continue stirring. Dice 3 large potatoes into small pieces. I left the skin/jackets on, proceed as you prefer. Add 3 cups of stock and potatoes to the stockpot.

Also bring in salt, pepper, thyme and dry parsley. Bring mixture to a boil and then reduce heat until potatoes are tender; when soft introduce the creamed corn.

Add 1 cup of milk and 1 1/2 cups of half and half. Lastly stir in the smoked Swiss cheese. Keep over medium/medium low heat. Stir frequently to keep chowder from getting too hot and to get the cheese melted. When the contents are pretty warm prepare the slurry with the flour and additional half and half. Whisk or blend until no lumps appear. Pour into warm soup to thicken.

Serve with crackers, green onions or parsley on top.

My family gave this great reviews this past weekend. Be sure and read additional comments about this recipe, inside the column dialogue.

KU research suggests wind power isn’t a red vs. blue issue in Kansas

By
Guest Columnist
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0
New wind installations aren’t allowed in about one-fifth of Kansas counties, in part to protect the nation’s last, largest swath of tallgrass prairie.

Wind power can spark passionate reactions – at times dividing neighbors and communities – but unlike many other hot-button topics, how this one shakes out across Kansas may not follow political lines.

Researchers at the University of Kansas have begun exploring the drivers behind the regulations that vary county by county and control where wind farms are – and aren’t – allowed.

They’ve created a first-of-its-kind interactive atlas that pulls together rules for the state’s 105 counties, creating “a real gold mine” for analysts to plumb in search of patterns, urban planning associate professor Ward Lyles said.

That gold mine will get richer in the coming weeks, when the Kansas Energy Transition Atlas expands to include local solar regulations. After that, the team will expand the project to additional states with significant wind energy potential.

The atlas appears to be the first time this level of transparency has become available for local rules across an entire state.

Kansas ranks No. 4 nationally in terms of wind production.

Just over half of the state’s counties either tolerate or encourage wind development through local regulations. Often they have rules for how far turbines must be set back from roads or buildings.

New wind farms are banned in about one-fifth of the state’s counties. Much of this relates to bipartisan, state-level decisions to protect a swath of eastern Kansas that includes the Flint Hills – the world’s largest remaining tallgrass prairie region.

County-level decisions also play a role in restricting wind power, in the Flint Hills and beyond. Shawnee, Linn, McPherson, Harvey and Sedgwick counties, for example, have adopted moratoriums on new installations.

Some Kansas counties – primarily in the western half of the state – haven’t taken any action to either restrict or encourage wind power.

The creators of the atlas hope to give residents a reliable place to check how renewable energy is regulated, including setback rules and other details.

They also hope to inform policymakers about the local regulatory landscape that impacts the nation’s efforts to reduce its emissions, said Ian Njuguna, an urban planning master’s student who helped design the atlas and built the online platform.

“The planning regulations and the grid network are the biggest barriers” to achieving federal goals for a cleaner power grid, Njuguna said. “But then when you ask the policymakers, ‘OK, how is the local (regulatory) landscape?’ most of them don’t know what’s happening down there.”

The Biden administration set several key targets aimed at eliminating the U.S. economy’s net emissions by 2050. This included a goal of transitioning the power grid to 100% “clean energy” by 2035. (The administration included renewable energy, nuclear power and fossil fuels paired with carbon capture in this definition.)

County commissions have more sway over renewable energy installations than other forms of power generation, such as coal or nuclear power.

But building a complete picture of local regulations isn’t easy.

A team of faculty and students spent one to three hours per county to find and review wind power regulations. Some counties post this information online; others don’t, requiring researchers to contact officials.

Solar regulation is arguably even more complex because cities can get involved, too.

“At the city level, you find the solar regulations are more for lower-scale solar projects,” such as backyard or rooftop panels, Njuguna said. “At the county level, it’s more like the utility scale.”

Though time-intensive, gathering this information allows researchers to explore correlations between local renewable energy rules and demographics, including income and politics.

County regulations don’t appear to reflect partisan politics, Lyles said. The team looked at voting patterns in the 2020 national elections.

Counties with mid-sized populations appear more likely to pass rules allowing wind power, while counties with larger populations are more likely to pass rules that limit or ban it, the researchers found.

Lyles said wind installations may meet with more opposition in places like Shawnee, Douglas and Johnson counties and along Interstate 135 in central Kansas, while residents of some less populous counties may see turbines as a potential boon to the local economy that could help farmers “either graze or plow around that and keep a farm in the family.”

Landowners can collect thousands of dollars in annual payments for each wind turbine that they host on their property. One farm real estate company says the average turbine payment in Iowa is $9,000 per year, but it has seen per-turbine payments that vary from $4,000 to $16,000.

Bigger turbines tend to bring bigger payments.

New wind farms use taller turbines than older ones do. As of last year, about one-tenth of the 4,000 wind turbines in Kansas were taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Kansas News Service ksnewsservice.org.

“Let’s Get Moving!”

By
Guest Columnist
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As we start the New Year, many people are making resolutions and setting goals for the next 12 months. One of the most common resolutions is to be more active. At Prairie Doc, we want all of our viewers to be both healthy and happy. This week, On Call with the Prairie Doc will be showcasing different ways people can incorporate movement into their lives. There is truly something for everyone.

Personally, I’ve explored a variety of activities with varying levels of success and competence. Regardless of the activity, what has made many of these experiences memorable and enjoyable are the people I have met along the way. Some of my most cherished friendships have formed through shared activities, proving to be just as beneficial to my mental health as any physical benefits of the activity itself.

Let me share some of the more unusual ways that I’ve stayed active throughout my life. In fourth grade, I joined the wrestling team. I became the first girl in my school to do so. I was not particularly good, ending the season with a 1-11 record. However, I was proud of myself for trying. By sixth grade, two other girls joined the team with me.

In junior high I tried volleyball, and while I loved, but was not very skilled. The place I did excel in was taekwondo. I started when I was ten and earned my 3rd degree black belt while in college. When I was in medical school, I still found time for activities and needed to try things that were the complete opposite of my school work. I tried rock climbing, belly dancing, and fencing. All activities that were outside my comfort zone, but quickly became welcome breaks from studying.

In Brookings, we are blessed with a multitude of activities in the area to try. I have participated in an adult kickball league. I have also started curling with the Brookings Curling Club. This game involves not only skill and strategy but a little bit of luck. On Prairie Doc, viewers will get to see me doing my favorite exercise activity, aerial silks. My medical residency training was in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the home town of the Ringling Brothers. I always loved the circus and aerial silks allows me to feel like I have joined the circus, if only for a few moments.

Finding the right activity may take some trial and error, but once you find something you love it will be worth it. So, as you set your goals for the coming year, consider trying something completely different. You may just discover an activity that brings you joy and a new community of friends along the way. Until next time, Stay healthy and active out there!

Jill Kruse, D.O. is part of The Prairie Doc® team of physicians and currently practices as a hospitalist in Brookings, South Dakota. Follow The Prairie Doc® at www.prairiedoc.org and on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads featuring On Call with the Prairie Doc®, a medical Q&A show on SDPB, 2 podcasts, and a Radio program, providing health information based on science, built on trust, streaming live on Facebook most Thursdays at 7 p.m. central and wherever podcast can be found.

Mass deportations could endanger Kansas’ meat economy: ‘It would be a ghost town’

By
Guest Columnist
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0

The price of beef is at all-time highs, but a major policy initiative of the incoming Trump Administration could drive them higher. In an industry that’s already strapped for workers, mass deportations could put some ranchers and feedlots out of business.

Raising cattle is tough. Nearly every day, Kansas ranchers and feedlot operators have to wrestle with drought, disease or blizzards. But the biggest problem is labor — the industry is chronically short-handed. That is especially true in southwest Kansas.

“If the immigrants weren’t there to help out, there wouldn’t be an operation functional in any of those places,” said Micheal Feltman, an immigration attorney in Cimarron, Kansas, just west of Dodge City.

Feltman helps the feedlots and mega dairy farms near there find workers. He said people funneling into southwest Kansas, from at least 40 countries, are the lifeblood of the beef industry and the regional economy.

Close to half the people who process meat in the U.S. were born someplace else, and immigrants do much of the work feeding and tending animals. Most of these workers are here legally, but a significant percentage aren’t, and documented immigrants often support close family members living with them illegally.

That’s why President-elect Donald Trump’s promises of a sweeping crackdown on immigration, sealing the border, and deporting 11 million people have many people in the meat industry worried.

Mass deportations would trigger a cascade of hardships across the chronically short-staffed meat industry, Feltman said. Processing plants would slow down, causing meat shortages that economists worry would drive consumer prices to record highs. Farmers would find themselves with more livestock than they could sell or care for, and the value of their animals would plummet.

“If every immigrant … over the last 20 years disappeared immediately, it would be a ghost town,” Feltman said. “I don’t know how the businesses would survive.”

The beef industry runs on imported labor

For one recent Haitian immigrant, who said she was afraid to divulge her name because she fled hunger and horrific violence at home, the stakes seem like life and death. The woman and her 4-year-old daughter made their way to Garden City three months ago. They’re here on temporary humanitarian parole. That gives her two years to apply for asylum.

She’s still waiting to be granted a work permit, but said she’d be willing to do any kind of labor, including the dangerous, uncomfortable, smelly jobs at the Tyson packing plant on the outskirts of town. Through an interpreter, she said she’s following the letter of the law to stay in the U.S., and has an appointment for a screening that should clear the way for her work visa, and financial independence.

“It will bring me a lot of joy,” she said. “Because I have a kid to take care of, I have myself, and if I could invest in the country, it would bring me a lot of joy.”

Given Trump’s rhetoric during the election and since, she now fears she’ll be sent back to the violent chaos in Haiti instead of joining a workforce that badly needs her.

“It’s not safe. The gangs are killing people,” she said.

The complicated immigration system doesn’t allow in enough legal immigrants to make up the difference, so some companies turn to undocumented workers to get by.

University of Arkansas economist Jada Thompson said mass deportations would exacerbate the problem, sending shockwaves up and down the meat supply chain. For one thing, deporting meat-packing workers would slow down the plants, triggering shortages.

“I think we’re going to see higher prices (for) the retail (customer),” said Thompson.

But farmers wouldn’t see any gains from soaring retail prices, she said, because there would be too many animals in the system for the meat processors to use, a glut building daily as more pigs and cows mature.

“I think you’ll end up eventually seeing lower prices (for) farmers,” said Thompson, “because it will eventually be oversupply because, effectively, they just can’t harvest that many animals.”

Thompson said the same thing happened a few years ago, but it wasn’t an immigration crackdown causing the labor shortage — it was the COVID pandemic.

“And what happened in that supply chain?” Thompson asked. “It backed it up. Prices went up. All of a sudden, you had people with pigs and cows that could not go to market because there was nowhere for them to be slaughtered.”

Those animals still had to be fed, and they still needed space to live in, but nobody wanted to buy them for meat, meaning farmers were spending extra money every day to keep more pigs and cows alive. Eventually, some farmers had to cut their losses, shoot their livestock and bury it. Everybody loses.

Kansas State University economist Glynn Tonsor said losses like those would spread broadly through southwest Kansas towns that depend on big feedlots, dairies and packing houses.

“They very often are one of the largest employers and local tax generators, so there’s relevant implications for funding of schools, funding of libraries, funding of anything you want to talk about that’s publicly funded in local areas,” said Tonsor.

It’s not clear yet how Trump administration deportations will work, if they happen at all, but Kansas Livestock Association CEO Matt Teagarden hopes they move slowly, and that they somehow shield the immigrant-dependent meat industry.

Teagarden said he believes border security should be tightened, but he’d like the system of granting work visas streamlined, not shackled. It’s either import people or import food.

“One of the alternatives is our food production goes overseas or moves outside the country,” said Teagarden. “If we don’t have an adequate workforce, can’t produce the food that we all want each day, each week, each month, that food production will go elsewhere.”

 

Wheat Scoop: Forge the Future together at the 21st Women Managing the Farm Conference

By
Guest Columnist
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0
Kansas Wheat

For audio version, visit kswheat.com.

Ready to forge your future on the farm? Join women from all walks of agriculture at the 2025 Women Managing the Farm Conference, February 13-14 in Manhattan. Registration is open now for the annual event designed to bring women’s voices, ideas and expertise together to collaborate and learn.

 

“Managing a farm is about more than business — it is about sustaining communities, fostering sustainability and adapting to the rapid changes shaping agriculture,” said Marsha Boswell, Kansas Wheat vice president of communications, who serves as one of the conference organizers. “The Women Managing the Farm Conference equips women in agriculture with knowledge, practical tools and networking opportunities to thrive in their roles. Don’t miss this opportunity to invest in your farm, your community and yourself.”

 

The Women Managing the Farm Conference has been providing a space for women in agriculture to share their knowledge and spark new conversations for 21 years. This year’s conference theme — Forging the Future — is about empowering attendees with the skills, connections and insights needed to lead operations forward. The conference will showcase keynote speakers who will inspire and educate on a wide range of essential topics including financial planning, grain marketing, K-State Research and Extension and internal motivation. Keynote speakers include:

 

Carrie Williams, Merchandising Manager at AgMark LLC, “A Global and Local View of Grain Supply and Demand”
Kristy Archuleta, professor of financial planning at the University of Georgia, “Forging the Future: Protecting Your Family’s Legacy”
Carol Ann Crouch, District Director of the West Plains Extension District of Scott and Finney Counties & Nancy Honig, Wild West District Agent, “Who Gets Grandma’s Yellow Pie Plate?”
Matt Rush, author of “Stress Free You”, “Managing the Generations”

In addition to the keynote sessions, women attending the conference will have the chance to participate in various breakout sessions discussing applicable topics for implementation at home on the farm, ranch or ag business.

 

Two pre-conference tours will be offered, providing enriching experiences for the participants in central Kansas and the Manhattan area. A pre-conference session, “Women in the Middle,” provides resources for women who are in the middle of generations, stages of life, for both taking care of yourself and caregiving. A Farm to Table Dinner on Wednesday evening rounds out the optional preconference events.

 

“Join us at the 2025 Women Managing the Farm Conference to connect with other trailblazing women, gain tools for success and learn from industry experts,” Boswell said. “Take this chance to invest in your skills, build connections and gain inspiration from women who understand what it takes to thrive in agriculture today.”

 

The event aims to inspire and empower women across Kansas with diverse agricultural backgrounds. Conference registration is $175 if registered by January 10, 2025. After that date, registration will increase to $200. Special student pricing for any high school or college student is $75. Each preconference event is an additional $25.

 

Learn more about the Women Managing the Farm Conference, see the full line-up of speakers and sessions and reserve your spot at womenanagingthefarm.com.

 

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Written by Julia Debes for Kansas Wheat

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