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Food and Environment Reporting Network
A Chilling Effect: How farms can help pollinators survive the stress of climate change
In 2002, Deirdre Birmingham and her husband, John Biondi, bought a 166-acre farm in southwestern Wisconsin’s Driftless region. On a portion of that land — once used to raise cattle and grow feed crops like corn, soybeans, and alfalfa — they planted apple and pear trees to make fermented ciders. On a larger, spring-fed portion, abutting the orchard and en route to meadow and oak forest, they seeded in Indian and June and bluestem grasses, echinacea and bergamot, spiderwort and blazing stars, restoring a portion of the region’s native prairie. They knew this would benefit beleaguered wild bees but they weren’t fully aware how this decision to rewild their landscape would help the farm, too.
The future of wild rice may depend on an unlikely alliance
This article is part of FERN’s series The Biodiversity Crisis. By Brian Barth and Flávia Milhorance, November 17, 2021. Can fashion help small farmers preserve the Amazon?. By Brian Barth and Flávia Milhorance, September 7, 2021. USDA wants to make farms climate-friendly. Will it work?. By Leah...
Does lab-grown meat have a P.R. problem?
If you avoid meat to cut down on animal cruelty, carbon emissions or both, your options are a lot better than they were a decade ago, which is to say they’re … fine. For people who can afford to pay a premium, veggie burgers and nuggets from the likes of Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. are a much tastier option than the average imitation-meat entrees of the past. What they aren’t, though, is meat—and many such products are so packed with salt and saturated fat that they probably shouldn’t be a staple of most diets. There is, however, another option on the way for those in search of better guilt-free protein: growing meat from cells in a lab, without raising any living animals for slaughter. Yes, really.
Why extreme weather means less food for California farmworkers
On a brisk afternoon in mid-January, Eloy Ortiz is pacing the back alley behind a white house in Watsonville, California, in the heart of California’s strawberry industry. The house is under an evacuation warning after weeks of torrential rain, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of women and children from crowding around the back gate. Some women are dragging grocery carts. Others are trying to entertain their very bored children. They have been waiting for hours for the bags of beans and maseca corn flour that volunteers are giving away.
Trouble at sea
It’s late July and I’m standing with Daniel Schindler at the mouth of Sam Creek, a small tributary of western Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to the largest wild sockeye salmon fishery in the world. The mouth of the creek—barely 20 feet wide—boils with fish. Schindler, a renowned salmon biologist, estimates that there are some 500 sockeye at our feet, their bodies gone cherry red and heads a copper-ore green because it’s spawning time.
How food became a weapon in America’s culture war
On August 7, National Review published an article lambasting the US Department of Agriculture’s decision, announced in May, to broaden the prohibition of discrimination in federally funded nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The writer’s argument centered on a Christian school in Tampa, Fla., that, he wrote, was being “forced by the government to choose between adherence to the laws of man and those of God.”
How California’s drought upended a powerful farming district
Late in the afternoon on Nov. 14, a historic email landed in the inboxes of hundreds of California farmers whose land lies within the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural irrigation agency in the country — and one of the most controversial. For decades, Westlands has led the fight...
Why universal free school meals matter
For the first two years of the pandemic, there was such a thing as a free lunch—for public school kids, at least. To blunt a spike in hunger caused by job losses and school closures, the federal government made school meals free, even available as “grab and go,” for virtually all children. But Republicans blocked a renewal of the program last spring, accusing Democrats of exploiting emergency measures to enact lasting changes. “Families don’t want schools to be permanently stuck in a pandemic posture,” argued Sen. Thom Tillis, the Republican from North Carolina.
A pillar of the climate-smart agriculture movement is on shaky ground
It’s one thing the Biden administration, agribusiness leaders, soil scientists and environmentalists all agree on: farmers across the country should plant cover crops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and food giants such as Land O’Lakes, Corteva, Bayer, and Cargill are paying farmers millions of dollars to sow rye, clover, radishes or other crops after, or even before, they harvest their corn and soybeans.
Why America’s food-security crisis is a water-security crisis, too
Deepak Palakshappa became a pediatrician to give poor kids access to good medical care. Still, back in his residency days, the now-associate professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem was shocked to discover that a patient caring for two young grandchildren was food insecure. “Our clinic had set up one of those food drive boxes, and near the end of a visit, she asked if she could have any of the cans because she didn’t have food for the holidays,” he recalls.
What seed-saving can tell us about the end of the world
In the fall of 1941, as the Nazis invaded Russia, choking trade routes into Leningrad and starving the city’s population, a group of botanists decided that it would not be the end of the world. They were researchers at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry, which at the time housed the world’s largest seed collection, a bank of precious genetic diversity. For 900 days, the botanists stood watch over a stockpile of nearly 400,000 seeds. They burned anything they could find to stay warm and smuggled out small shipments of seeds to be preserved abroad. But mostly they just survived, until they didn’t. Faced with diminishing supplies and surrounded by seeds they refused to eat, the scientists began to starve. The siege ended in 1944, and even with nine members of the research team dead, the survivors considered their efforts a success. They had saved species of corn, wheat, and rice, among numerous other crops, that were invaluable to the Russian people — and, as the scientists saw it, to the entire human race.
The resurrection of Hiware Bazar
As a young boy in the 1970s, Vishwanath Thange knew hunger. He usually lived on one meal a day, not enough when you’re working construction. But Thange had to take the work — or starve. He was born in Hiware Bazar, a village tucked deep inside the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Back then, the hamlet was a crime-ridden backwater, desperately poor and largely abandoned by government agencies. Thange’s family owned seven acres, but chronic drought prevented them from growing food to eat or sell. So Thange left, when he was 15, to look for work in nearby cities. About 20 years ago, he returned to Hiware Bazar, and today he is one of the 89 farmers there who have assets worth more than a million Indian rupees — a fortune in a country where 90 percent of the population makes less than 300,000 rupees a year. In the past 25 years, every farmer in Hiware Bazar has prospered, says Thange. “Today,” he says, “not a single person goes to bed hungry.”
For one historically Black California town, a century of water access denied
Valeria Contreras’ phone started ringing on a bustling Saturday last February, when she was driving past almond and pistachio orchards on an errand run. Some callers sounded panicked. Others were just upset. Where’s the water? they asked her. How come you guys don’t notify us? I know I’m past due, but did you guys turn off my water?
Is the Ojai Pixie dust?
BROADCAST ON 60+ PUBLIC RADIO STATIONS, WITh 330,000+ LISTENERS. Ojai, California, has a charming main street, with tile roofs and Spanish-revival architecture. On weekends, crowds of the bohemian chic spill out of restaurants, boutiques and art galleries. The Ojai Valley is surrounded by mountains, and as long-time resident Tony Thacher...
The great carbon-capture debate
One farmer dogged pipeline surveyors as they traversed his southwestern Iowa fields, peppering them with unwelcome questions about their proposed project. Another cornered Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds at a fundraising event. A third painted “No Carbon Pipeline” on a semi-trailer and parked it at the intersection of two county roads. These and other activists – an unlikely mix of Bernie Bros, Fox News devotees, Women’s March veterans, and at least one Q-Anon follower – meet weekly on Zoom to plot strategy, write letters to the editor, and leave angry voicemails with state legislators.
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The Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) is the first independent, nonprofit news organization that produces award-winning, high-impact investigative and explanatory reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health through exclusive partnerships with regional and national media outlets.
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