During the first conference in a series of public-private partnership symposia between Georgetown Law, the White House Rural Council, and the USDA, we snapped Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at the Washington Hilton. (Earlier, Georgetown Law Dean Treanor pointed out that Vilsack's grandfather was a Gtown alum, class of 1910.) The conference was a public-private partnership in itself, intended to help create novel approaches to bringing together the public and private sectors.

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear gave the keynote. An exciting piece of news was the announcement that CoBank is committing $10 billion to the newly created US Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund, through which companies can invest in infrastructure projects. "Entrepreneurship is what the future's going to be about in rural America," Beshear says.