MITCHELL - A new South Dakota State University report says some rural parts of the state - designated as "food deserts" - need better nutrition.

The report from SDSU's Rural Life and Census Data Center, identified almost half of the state's 66 counties as "food deserts."

To receive the designation, a county must have residents who have low access to large food retailers. The researchers reviewed studies on nutrition, rural population trends and food availability.

Twenty-nine counties are identified as food deserts on a map in the report: Harding, Perkins, Custer, Fall River, Haakon, Jackson, Bennett, Jones, Tripp, Gregory, Douglas, Charles Mix, Aurora, Jerauld, Sanborn, Miner, Kingsbury, Hamlin, Clark, Spink, Day, Marshall, Sully, Hyde, Hand, Potter, Faulk, Edmunds and McPherson.

The report says some people in towns without a grocery store might not have access to food with high nutritional value.

And people in the small towns that have a grocery store might face higher prices because small-town retailers sometimes can't buy in bulk, according to the report. That, the authors say, means shoppers might overlook food with better nutritional value because of the cost - leading to poor health habits.

"Some of these smaller grocery stores, because of the lack of access, have to pay a higher price in order to be competitive," said Trevor Brooks, an SDSU graduate research assistant. "It's harder for supply trucks to supply that type of food, so it costs more to deliver to those types of stores."

"The pricing is the difference," he said. "We know that milk is way overpriced."

To combat this trend, Brooks said residents in smaller communities that still have grocery stores must place a stronger focus on supporting those local retailers.

"The food stores can help, but it's ultimately going to be up to working on economic development and encouraging people to shop locally," said Brooks. "If we don't do it from the bottom, what's going to happen is the large corporations will continue to pull the rural residents into their stores. This will further drive away local grocery stores or make them raise their prices even higher."

Information on local food prices and availability is being gathered across the state and should let researchers more accurately identify food deserts, Brooks said.

"We're kind of revamping their definition of a food desert," he said. "Instead of using the county as the unit of analysis, we're actually going to pinpoint where the grocery stores that do have the necessary food are located and map out from there."

Brooks said that 98 percent of the nation's food desert counties are rural.

On the Net: http://sdrurallife.sdstate.edu/food%20desert%20newsletter.pdf