Thanks for asking.

Prairie Center blog is the creation of Rebecca Terk (aka flyingtomato). A native Vermonter, it has been thirty years since she first moved to South Dakota, whose landscape she adores and whose politics she abhors has some strong feelings about that will occasionally be published here.

Terk holds Masters degrees in U.S. History and English from the University of South Dakota (Go Yotes!) where she worked as a graduate researcher and assistant at the SD Oral History Center. She taught middle school, high school, and university students for close to a decade before launching into community organizing and policy work on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and rural communities in Western Minnesota and South Dakota. She owned and operated truck farms and developed local and regional markets and distribution for producers in both South Dakota and Minnesota, and worked with family farmers, rural communities, and local governments to protect local control and slow the spread of large-scale factory farm operations. She lobbied the SD Legislature for local control, local food & ag, and protecting water and natural resources. Terk is a Master Naturalist, trained in both Minnesota and South Dakota.

With her move to the Black Hills, Terk’s focus has shifted to protection of the Rapid Creek Watershed from imminent threats of minerals exploration and mining. Our way of life, our water supply, as well as our agriculture, tourism, and recreation economies depend on Rapid Creek, its tributaries, and the aquifers it replenishes.

Water is life, and protecting our water supply protects our way of life.

This blog was begun in Prairie Center Township, on a dilapidated farmstead overlooking the Vermillion River in Southeast South Dakota. It was continued for a spell on the Prairie Coteau in the northeastern part of the state. Now, I write from He Sapa–the Black Hills, where I live with my husband and our furry critters on the banks of Rapid Creek.

No matter where I am, I keep the prairie at my center.