The Bedford Falls Test: BDO Zones and the Path to Rural Development

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... At the BDO Zone Summit this week, I saw it again: the quiet math of resilience. Not flashy, not famous—but structured. Strategic. And real. This isn’t about grand pronouncements; it’s about the tangible, daily acts of holding on and building anew. Like Ma Joad, the enduring symbol of American fortitude, said: “We’re the people that live”. And BDO Zones are showing us how they live, why some places are ready to be reborn—again. They reveal the deep, often unspoken reasons why certain communities persist, even when the economic tides turn against them.

Yes, they are about the bioeconomy, they are places in our supply chains. Yes, they are about Opportunity and Development, they are places in our economy. In the end, they are Zones, places in the heart.

The best BDO Zones aren’t just shovel-ready—they’re soul-ready. They don’t just prepare land; they prepare meaning. This brings us to the core dilemma many rural communities face. Let’s look at that in more detail, shall we?

In the context of BDO Zones, this translates to a Classic zoning + trusted developer approach—where established structure meets ingrained habit, and new projects genuinely get built. It’s about leveraging existing community rhythms for new growth, a concept that Todd Chaput from Lewis County, Washington, has observed first-hand. “It’s exciting to be able to go out to these small communities with realistic opportunities that could really have some likely industrial investment in these small towns that they would have never seen before”. This is how new industries can slot into existing community structures, benefiting from the foundational stability already present.

The panelists at the BDO Zone Summit underscored this. Shauna Carr of Sarnia-Lambton highlighted how BDO Zones helped attract investment from companies who “did not know my area, my region existed before they connected through the BDO zone”. Chad Schreck from North Iowa Corridor noted that the BDO Zone rating provided “a third party, independent resource” that validates a region’s assets, proving “incredibly valuable” for both new projects and existing ones seeking funding. Rod Cock from Nova Scotia shared that receiving an A rating for Southwestern Nova Scotia was “a little bit of a life for the forest industry… to say, hey, yeah, we knew we had something good, and somebody else has come in and verified that”. This verification and validation are key to attracting the right kind of investment.

From the project developers, we hear a similar refrain. Matt Boger of Regen Corp. emphasized the creation of opportunities “especially in these communities where, you know, we’re targeted, which are, you know, often agricultural communities that struggle to keep the kids there in the community, working on the farm, can’t support the whole family”. Doug Binsted of Azure Sustainable Fuels added that the “high impact jobs” created are “very coveted jobs in those communities, and they give those communities an opportunity for their young people to stay, to stay at home”. Nick Andrews of USA Bioenergy confirmed that the BDO Zone rating was “very helpful” in the capital raising process, providing the necessary “independent third party review” for funders. As Jordan Solomon eloquently put it during the panel, without these connections, underutilized biomass assets are “just trees in the forest,” but “when we put them together with you, then all of a sudden we create something out of something that this wasn’t there before”.

The Bottom Line

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting more than 30 of these regions, towns and counties on our Digest TV show The BDO Zone. At the end of each episode, I ask the guests “if tomorrow a developer came to your town for the first time, what’s the one thing they would find that would make them fall in love with your part of the world and never go anywhere else for their project?” Sure, some answers touch on infrastructure, incentives, abundant and affordable feedstock, but the vast majority talk about the people, the quality of life, the community spirit.

So when we ask what makes a place worth building in—or fighting for—it’s not just tax incentives or square footage. It’s whether the town knows the second verse of the song. Whether the coffee’s still served in heavy mugs. Whether kids still play in the same fields their parents did. READ MORE