Food and Environment Reporting Network
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A news organization that produces in-depth & investigative journalism in the critically underreported areas of food, agriculture, and environmental health. Through partnerships with local & national mainstream media outlets, we seek to tell stories that will inspire, inform, and have a lasting impact.
Food and Environment Reporting Network
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Mother Jones
Dostie Farm, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm’s milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state’s allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
“We called bullshit,” Dostie remembers. PFAS contamination had recently been found at two other Maine dairy fa ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
1M ago
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Grist
America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant.
But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic. The animals lose hooves. Parts of their tails and the tips of their ears ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
2M ago
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Mother Jones
This article is part of FERN’s series The Farm Bill Fight
Tribal nations want more control over their food supply
By Bridget Huber, February 21, 2024
The essential workers missing from the farm bill
By Teresa Cotsirilos, February 14, 2024
The farm bill hall of shame
By Claire Kelloway, February 7, 2024
When must-pass meets mega-partisan
By Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl, January 31, 2024
Want farmers to protect the environment?
By Tom Philpott, J ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
2M ago
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The New Republic
Linwood Scott III climbs two-story tobacco cropping machines with real agility and apparently no thought to falling. The sixth-generation tobacco farmer is proud of his machinery, upgraded 20 years ago and therefore relatively new. He delights in every tool and accoutrement of the cropping, curing, and baling process: every trailer, every sawed-off school bus that pulls those trailers, every conveyor belt, every one of his 200 small curing barns.
Scott, in his early fifties, is from Lucama, North Carolina ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
2M ago
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This Story’s Impact
8 million web readers a month
2 million social users a month
Mother Jones
This article is part of FERN’s series The Farm Bill Fight
The farm bill hall of shame
By Claire Kelloway, February 7, 2024
When must-pass meets mega-partisan
By Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl, January 31, 2024
Want farmers to protect the environment?
By Tom Philpott, January 31, 2024
Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.
The Departme ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
2M ago
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Mother Jones
When I spoke to Mandi Remington in late January, she had $7 in her bank account and had run out of milk. At times like these, which happen toward the end of most months, she cobbles together “stone soup” from what’s in the house, she said, or feeds her three children and then makes her own meal from whatever is left on their plates.
So when she found out that Iowa, where she lives in Iowa City, is among the 15 states that decided not to participate in Summer EBT, a new feder ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
3M ago
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8 million web readers a month
2 million social users a month
Mother Jones
This article is part of FERN’s series The Farm Bill Fight
When must-pass meets mega-partisan
By Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl, January 31, 2024
Want farmers to protect the environment?
By Tom Philpott, January 31, 2024
Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.
The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice fa ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
3M ago
Share
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This Story’s Impact
8 million web readers a month
2 million social users a month
Mother Jones
This article is part of FERN’s series The Farm Bill Fight
When must-pass meets mega-partisan
By Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl, January 31, 2024
Want farmers to protect the environment?
By Tom Philpott, January 31, 2024
Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover.
The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice fa ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
3M ago
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This Story’s Impact
6.4 million pageviews per month
The New Republic
For all the backbiting and vitriol, the main candidates in the recent Iowa GOP presidential caucus agreed on a lot of issues, from immigration crackdowns (wonderful) to federal incentives for electric cars (evil). But no topic brought them into more violent consensus than the sanctity of federal support for corn-based ethanol. The heart of the nation’s corn belt, Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of that industry; and Donald Trump and his longshot rivals all vowed to maintain the federal policies that prop it up.&n ..read more
Food and Environment Reporting Network
3M ago
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44m weekly audience across platforms
NPR
The Biden administration’s $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program hopes to convince farmers and ranchers to adopt practices that will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in the ground. It also seeks to make amends for a century of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the grants. In its program description, USDA said Black, Native, and other “historically underserved” farmers needed to be a key part of all projects in the ..read more