by Chris Bennett | January 2, 2018 Mikey Taylor felt like a slave to soil testing. In a battle against hardened ground and poor soil quality on some of his east Arkansas farmland, Taylor turned to soil testing and NPK. But instead of answers, he found contradiction. Representative soil samples sent to multiple labs across…

Howdy, My google search picked up this article this morning. It used material from yesterday’s Politico article I was quoted in on the same topic. Under the best of circumstances, intergenerational transfer of assets for agriculture is a difficult handoff. When retiring farmers and landowners work with either family members or beginning farmers, it is…

by Charles Massy | December 20, 2017 Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, and yet many of its farming practices see water routinely squandered. One visionary farmer’s insights, however, have had a global influence on water use in the landscape and might yet help avert agricultural, and ecological, collapse. Examine each question in…

by Michael Grabell | Dec. 28, 2017 Chicken plants have recruited thousands of foreign workers in recent years through a little-known program to fill jobs they say Americans won’t do. The first week Yongho Yeom worked on the chicken line at the House of Raeford poultry plant was like nothing he had ever imagined as…

by Peter Waldman and Kartikay Mehrotra | December 29, 2017 Cleanup at the slaughterhouse is as dangerous as it is repulsive, and the immigrants who do the work are under pressure to complete it faster than ever. No one knew her real name. At work she was Tiffany Sisneros, until her arm got crushed in…

The Accountability of Big Meat January 1, 2018 By Sherri Dugger When Dodge Ram aired its two-minute “God Made a Farmer” commercial during the 2013 Super Bowl, I, like thousands of others, applauded the commercial’s focus on our nation’s unsung workers: the family farmer. At that time, my husband and I had just purchased a…