Podcasts about North Dakota, United States

A lot of what plays on this page comes back to ground and weather. In a Growing Harvest Ag Network episode covering the Farmers Union Processing + Meats ribbon cutting, a speaker explains that small-town meat lockers are mostly gone and some members now drive two hours with their animals. On Growing Together, the meteorologist Jesse Ritka describes a North Dakota summer of more than 75 tornadoes, a record season. The rest of the page is football talk about NDSU and the Mountain West, hockey from Fargo, a politics show arguing over who rents and who owns, a cold-case series, and Medora history spoken in character.

What North Dakota is

North Dakota is a northern Great Plains state on the Canadian border, with Minnesota across the Red River to the east, Montana to the west and South Dakota to the south. It has fewer than a million people. Fargo is its largest city and Bismarck its capital. It is known for wheat and other field crops, for the Bakken oil fields in the west, and for the Badlands along the Little Missouri River.

Crops, gardens and the outdoors

The two shows closest to the land sound nothing alike. Growing Harvest Ag Network runs like a busy farm desk. It is fast and compressed, stacking policy, weather, crop conditions, input costs and expert reaction into one continuous run, and its titles move between spring wheat harvest in North Dakota, fertilizer prices and beef imports. The clips are where the state comes through. The meat-processing story goes back to COVID, which exposed the gap when healthy hogs were euthanized for lack of processing capacity. Another clip sets Brazil's move to an E32 ethanol blend beside North Dakota's debate over year-round E15. In a third, the chief executive of FarmQA recalls a customer saying the software "gave me my life back" because it let him make his kids' ballgames again.

Growing Together, with host John Lamb and Don Kinzler, moves at the opposite speed. It is a leisurely kitchen-table conversation about gardening across the upper Midwest that often starts from a listener question, a photo or a seasonal prompt. Its titles follow the calendar, from early spring tasks and soil testing to late-season snows, Easter plants and August weeding. A clip from an Emerald Isle episode turns to late blight and the Irish potato famine, with a short aside, flagged as not political, about the poor Irish and their often English landowners. The speaker grows a lot of potatoes and explains the appeal: they store well and give a lot of food from a small area. Another clip turns on a basswood with a ten-foot trunk circumference that looked healthy and was hollow inside.

Northland Outdoors covers hunting, fishing and wildlife in North Dakota and Minnesota. Its titles mix outdoor stories such as "Devils Lake Ice Options" with regional weekend forecasts. Its clips lean to Minnesota: a turkey-hunting preview traces Minnesota's turkey population from near zero to more than 70,000, and Chad Kuhl tells listeners to take notes while Brian Brosdahl shares his approach to big bluegills through the ice.

Realignment and the Clark Cup

NDSU is the biggest story in the football clips. On MonDak Football Show, word breaks on a Friday night that NDSU has an invite to the Mountain West and is working on the financials. Ross Dellinger reported it and Chris Vannini confirmed it. Welcoming Sam to the conversation, the other voice wonders whether the FCS has ever seen a bigger rumor. In a realignment episode Sam says "the answer is money" before asking what college football is actually solving. It is a brisk, casual two-person show in which one voice throws out a claim and the other tests it. Its guests include Jack Michaels, billed as the voice of the UND Fighting Hawks, along with the voices of the USD Coyotes, the SDSU Jackrabbits and the Montana State Bobcats.

The Rink Live is filed under Minnesota high school hockey, but its North Dakota clip belongs to Fargo. The Force take the Clark Cup from Dubuque in four games, and Max Watson is named series MVP after leading the USHL playoffs with 17 points. The show's other clips are NHL draft talk about USHL and NTDP prospects. Like MonDak it is a two-voice show, but more measured: one speaker sets up a topic, the other tightens it with detail, and they move on.

Who rents and who buys

Housing connects Plain Talk, a North Dakota politics show in which Rob Port and Chad Oban bring a left-right dynamic, with Realtor Moms. On Plain Talk, Adrian Cummings argues that North Dakota has become a majority-renter state because younger workers value mobility over owning a home. He also says Grand Forks has 65 builders where about 100 would be expected for a city its size. Rob asks whether the kind of housing being incentivized should change if younger people would rather rent. He points to development on the edges of Minot and to a property tax debate over the cost of sewer, fire and police protection and street lights. The show's range runs past housing: in another episode Chris Tiongson says physicians must be "a healer instead of just a technician" to get past partisan labels.

Realtor Moms, a Fargo-Moorhead show, comes at the subject from the buyer's side. In a how-to-buy episode, Jamie R. Swenson and Tasha Barrett move from the mortgage lender to the homeowner's insurance agent. They explain why an offer deadline can expire for good before a seller accepts, and they go through the checks to make on the final walkthrough before buyers get their keys. Titles such as "What is an Appraisal Gap?" stay on the same practical ground.

Medora, and an unresolved murder

In the State Historical Society of North Dakota's History Alive performances, the Marquis de Mores speaks for himself. He argues that Dakota can ship dressed beef east faster and more profitably than Chicago's cattle system, and the same performance tells how he christened Medora by smashing wine against a tent peg. "Madam De Mores History Alive Performance" is told in the voice of his wife. She recalls threats on his life, local cowboys who resented him, and a murder charge after an encounter with "a band of drunken louts". He was always vindicated, she says, and "the spell of the Badlands was magical." Her account also follows Medora from a town without a church or school to a community with 22 regular students.

Dakota Spotlight, from investigative journalist James Wolner, gives a numbered run of episodes to a single case, Unresolved, The Murder of Joel Lovelien, with parts titled "A Portrait of Joel", "Travis on Trial" and "15 Years Later". In "Halloween at The Broken Drum", a taxi driver picks up a silent, blood-covered man in part of a yellow Halloween costume. The death is then set out under three competing views: an unknown killer, responsibility never settled, or an attack by passengers from a party bus. The portrait episode adds a different kind of detail: after Joel's death, a UND hockey arena honored him by playing the SpongeBob SquarePants theme.

Where to start

• The farm economy: Growing Harvest Ag Network, especially the AGRI-BIZ clips on meat processing and E15.
• Gardening at an easy pace: Growing Together, from late blight to the hollow basswood.
• Football: MonDak Football Show, starting with the NDSU invite.
• A story: Dakota Spotlight for the Lovelien case, or State Historical Society of North Dakota Podcasts for the Marquis de Mores in character.

The North Dakota feed on this page plays clips from these shows.