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Gross said. "It's very exciting and inspirational."
• The group will help its 200th farmer sometime this fall. Volunteers set up camp on a farm and do the physical labor of seeding a crop or harvesting it. The group has the ability to sow or reap major crops such as wheat, corn, soybeans, sunflowers and barley and even lesser crops such as canola, flaxseed and pinto beans. It aims to offer help to family farms where the operators have experienced a hardship beyond their control, not to farms that have been mismanaged or to corporate farms.
• Gross helps with the work, handling business matters during layovers while he is flying abroad and using vacation time to travel home during the spring planting and fall harvesting seasons.
• "I put in about 1,000 hours a year," he said.

• Gross wants Farm Rescue to keep growing, though it likely will be a couple of years before another state is added. Kansas and Nebraska are possibilities, because businesses there have expressed a willingness to support the nonprofit, but Gross said the focus now is on Iowa.
• He encouraged farmers to apply for the help.
• "Farmers are oftentimes independent, prideful people, and a lot of times hesitant to ask for assistance. They've always done it on their own. We want to get it out there that we're here to help."
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• ROSEBUD, S.D. (AP) -- Authorities have lifted an evacuation order for a community on the Rosebud Indian Reservation following improving weather conditions that have helped firefighters battle several wildfires.
• Fire Information Officer Beth Hermanson says authorities are lifting evacuation orders for the Longhorn Complex, a set of fires that has burned nearly 70 square miles in south-central South Dakota. The fires are 70 percent contained.
• Residents of the Spring Creek community will be allowed back into their homes Wednesday afternoon, and the Red Cross will be closing its shelter for evacuees.
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• RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) -- Six businesses in western South Dakota's Black Hills have been ordered to pay almost $300,000 in fines and back wages to temporary foreign workers for violating the terms of a special visa program.

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