Most residents of the Fort Dodge area had never heard of CJ CheilJedang Corp. in late 2011 when the South Korea based company announced that it would build its first North American plant in Webster County. It’s been nearly a decade since the company made that announcement. In that time the ...

Some 20 years ago, Jan and Phyllis Wilson, of Fort Dodge, came up with an idea that they believed would help make their community look a lot nicer. While vacationing in Texas, the Wilsons had been part of volunteer efforts to clean up and beautify some communities and a state park. They ...

The annual Webster County Fair is a key element in the life of the community, even for those people who don’t live on farms. Every year hundreds of people converge on the fairgrounds south of Fort Dodge to see the animals raised by 4-H members, admire the various projects on display and ...

An event that bicyclists all over the country, and even some from around the world, look forward to every year is coming to Fort Dodge this summer. That event is, of course, RAGBRAI. On July 26, thousands of bicyclists will pedal their way into Fort Dodge as part of that cross-state bicycle ...

Folks around Fort Dodge who love the blues have something to sing the blues about. That sad event is the demise of the Lizard Creek Blues Society. After 20 years, the group’s leaders decided to disband the organization because it was getting harder and harder to find the time and energy to ...

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig is encouraging eligible farm owners to apply for the 2021 Century and Heritage Farm Program. The program is sponsored by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and recognizes families that have owned ...

There were more than 900 occasions during 2020 when someone in or around Humboldt needed the help of trained emergency medical personnel. The ambulance service of Humboldt County Memorial Hospital responded to every one of those 916 instances with a mainly volunteer crew. Think about that for ...

A lot of exciting things are in the works for anyone who wants to get outside and have some fun in Fort Dodge and Webster County. Fishing, running, bicycling and just hanging out by the river would all get a boost from an ambitious set of projects unveiled this week. The list includes ...

Since 2006, the Community Health Center of Fort Dodge has been taking care of thousands of people from north central Iowa and doing so in a way that won’t bankrupt their patients. The center is dedicated to providing care to everyone regardless of their financial status or what kind of ...

For more than one year now, we have been talking about the superheroes who are our front-line workers. We paid tribute to their sacrifice and showed our gratitude for their service. They faced the challenge of working where they were needed through a global pandemic. And then, just as we ...

Recently, the world has often seemed like a dark and scary place. COVID-19 still remains a threat, mass shootings strike fear in the soul of America and economic uncertainty burdens too many people. In the midst of all these grim developments, it can be easy to forget that goodness still ...

Everyone is well aware that law enforcement officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel risk their lives every day to protect us. On Tuesday, Iowans received a horrifying reminder that there is another group of people that risk their lives every day to protect the public. ...

Amid the endless and often meaningless bickering in Washington, a representative and a senator from Iowa have introduced measures that would actually do some good for the public. In a move that shows bipartisanship is still possible, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, a Republican who represents ...

As another growing season approaches, today has been set as National Ag Day by the Agriculture Council of America. The council designates the week within it falls as National Ag Week. One goal of National Ag Day is to recognize the contribution agriculture makes in the lives of all of us. The ...

Here we go again. The weekend of March 13-14 marked the biannual changing-of-the-clocks ritual known as daylight saving time. Why do we do this, again? Sure, we’ve all had more on our minds in 2020-2021 than getting Congress to abolish daylight saving time (or permanently stick with it). ...

As the Fort Dodge community continues to struggle with a shortage of available child care openings, it received some welcome news recently. Iowa Workforce Development has awarded more than $1 million in grants to support a couple of local child care projects. Those grants won’t close the ...

The value of preschool can be summed up in one statistic found in Fort Dodge Community School District assessments from the current academic year. Those assessments revealed that kindergarteners who did not attend preschool performed on average about 18 percent lower than their classmates who ...

Spring break is underway in the Fort Dodge Community School District, but that doesn’t mean the learning has to stop. In fact, students in the afterschool program called Dodger Academy have a fun way to learn some things about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) thanks ...

Iowa continues to lag behind the rest of the nation in one economic category, but in this case, that is a good thing. Iowa’s unemployment rate for January, the most recent month for which statistics are available, was 3.5 percent. The national unemployment rate for January was 6.3 ...

For more than two centuries, the bedrock of our liberty and prosperity as Americans has been our right to know what is going on around us and to discuss it freely. Our nation’s founders believed that was so important that when they wrote the Bill or Rights, they made freedom of speech the ...