News

The 4th annual Bunny Hunt was held in Colome, SD, on Saturday March 28th. 104 kids, ranging in ages from 5 to 14, participated in the event. The younger group had to provide three bunnies, while the older group had to bring five bunnies to qualify. The event was held at the Colome Legion and is run by Josh and Kayla Olson.

As of reports Monday morning, the fires we reported on last week— Morrill, Road 203, Anderson Bridge, and Cottonwood—are now considered 100% contained. Two new fires, however, started overnight Wednesday, March 25, in Grant County, NE, northeast of the Morrill Fire.

Petitions for city council and school board were due on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, and the response for both was unenthusiastic. Jason Frasch will return to the Gregory School District Board of Education for another term, as his was the only petition turned in for the position.

The 86th annual stockholder meeting of Rosebud Farmers Union was held Saturday evening, March 28, 2026, at Gregory Memorial Auditorium. Board President Jeff Zink began the meeting with a moment of silence for all those impacted by the recent wildfires.

A new survey of U.S. teens by Junior Achievement USA (JA)—long a leader in experiential learning— and global research firm Ipsos shows that 73 percent believe AI (Artificial Intelligence) will have a mostly positive effect, or none at all, on their ability to get a good job in the future. This, despite recent estimates by various experts of significant job losses due to AI within the next five years.

Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA In Parts I through III, we talked about how, in just over a generation, the U.S. cattle industry had succumbed to an oligopolistic market structure created by global beef packers with unlimited access to lower-cost and undifferentiated imports. This caused the U.S. cattle industry to contract in terms of the number of cattle producers, number of cattle and number of feedlots, which congregate cattle prior to slaughter. It also caused the distortion of competitive market forces that altered the competitive allocation of the consumers’ beef dollar along the supply chain, severed the historical relationship between cattle prices and beef prices and relegated the cattle industry to being incapable of withstanding even moderate economic shocks. We ended Part III by explaining that the second economic shock – the drought that struck in late 2020 – occurred as the cattle industry was already liquidating due to five years of depressed cattle prices, which occurred even though beef prices were rising. We then explained that the global beef packers were importing record volumes of beef from around the world to supplement the domestic cattle industry’s production shortfall. And though record imports had historically driven domestic cattle prices downward, the supply of domestic cattle was so tight that cattle prices broke free from their restraints and began chasing beef prices skyward.

The Gregory American Legion Hutchison Post #6 hosted the SD Department District 3 Spring Meeting for the American Legion, Legion Auxiliary, Sons, and Legion Riders on Saturday, March 21, 2026 at 11 a.m. District 3 includes 21 Legion posts in the central part of the state with locations from Fairfax to Pierre to Hoven in the north.

FFA members attended their first contest in Bridgewater Emery on Monday, March 9, 2026. There were 47 students competing from Burke and Gregory schools.

Congrats to all FFA members on a second successful contest in Howard, which was held on Wednesday, March 18, 2026. Results are posted below: Ag Mechanics 5th out of 29 Bentley Dehning 17th, Mac Zimbelman 23rd, Mitch Zimbelman 31st, Tyler Kenzy 36th, Mason Simison 77th.

Maddie Toll, a second-year medical student at the USD School of Medicine, is finishing up her third week of a three-week rotation at Avera Medical Group Gregory and Avera Gregory Hospital. Maddie is far from home, having graduated from Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.