by Katy Keiffer | July 31st , 2017 The answer, increasingly, is not American farmers. We’re used to thinking of escalating rents as an urban problem, something suffered mostly by the citizens of booming cities. So when city people look out over a farm—whether they see corn stalks, or long rows of fruit bushes, or…
by Andrea Reusing | July 30, 2017 7:18 AM ET Novel and thrilling in earlier days, today’s farm-to-table restaurant menus have scaled new heights of supposed transparency. The specificity can be weirdly opaque, much like an actual menu item that recently made the rounds: Quail Egg Coated in the Ashes of Dried Sheep’s S***. Farm-to-table…
By HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH | 07/30/2017 07:04 AM EDT Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump’s pick to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, has been many things in life: He’s an F-16 fighter pilot turned defense contractor turned academic; he was a conservative radio host in Sioux City, Iowa; and he was a failed U.S….
By JULIE TURKEWITZ | July 26, 2017 SAN LUIS, Colo. — Each morning as the sun curves over Main Street in this isolated desert town, Felix Romero takes the worn wooden steps from his upstairs apartment to his downstairs grocery. He flips open the lock on a scratched blue door, turns on the lights and…
by H. Claire Brown | July 27th , 2017 Three days before Christmas in 2014, a Kewaunee, Wisconsin family and their visiting relatives had to leave their home to celebrate the holiday in a motel. Their drinking water seemed contaminated, and tests from a few days prior indicated the presence of coliform and E. coli…
July 20, 2017 4:45 PM | Steve Baragona Ancient civilizations plowed themselves into oblivion, and modern agriculture risks doing it again, geologist David Montgomery says. In his new book, Montgomery says a growing number of farmers are using techniques that can save their farms from slow death by erosion. In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our…
R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America For Immediate Release: July 25, 2017 Media Contact: R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard Phone: 406:252-2516; r-calfusa Group Responds to Latest Round of NCBA’s False Claims Billings, Mont. – The below statement can be attributed to R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard: "I don’t recall ever meeting the NCBA’s new CEO, Kendal…
by Sharon Lerner | July 26 2017, 8:43 a.m. For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal…
By Tom Philpott on Feb 24, 2010 “Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.” –Dutch saying For all of its ecological baggage, synthetic nitrogen does one good deed for the environment: it helps build carbon in soil. At least, that’s what scientists have assumed for decades. If that were true, it…
By Peggy Lowe Of all the expensive machinery Tom Giessel worked during the 2017 wheat harvest, his favorite sits in the office of his home. It’s a microfilm machine, the kind found in a high school library. Giessel uses it for his work as the historian of the National Farmers Union, the nation’s second-largest farm…