Lodestone
Public data about rural places, gathered county by county and kept the way each source published it.
What Lodestone is
Lodestone is CRAI’s rural data layer. It pulls public data about a specific rural county (economics, agriculture, health, workforce and more), source by source, into one place CRAI maintains. CAIR, our Community AI Readiness assessment, is the first to draw on it, so an assessment starts from evidence already gathered and described rather than collected from scratch.
public data sources loaded for a single county
minutes to load them
data points across a dozen counties, as of September 2026
Going county by county turns AI’s rural blind spot into a specific, fixable gap. In federal farm data, the counties around Durango have hundreds of entries each. San Juan County, next door, has one.
How it works
Each source is described before it’s used
Lodestone records what each source measures, how current it is and what period it covers, so an analysis knows what a figure can and can’t say.
Figures stay at their published level
A figure a source publishes for a county stays a county figure. Lodestone doesn’t combine or average figures into a level the source never reported.
Gaps are filled on purpose
When CAIR needs data Lodestone doesn’t hold, the gap is noted and the source is added deliberately, so the next assessment can reuse it.
Where it stands
Lodestone is in use inside CAIR today. Over time it will become the home for all of CRAI’s data, including RAIN, our weekly rural AI newsletter, and BRAIN, our cited rural-knowledge library. For how Lodestone grew out of BRAIN, read AI Has a Rural Blind Spot.