A Reporter at Large November 15, 2021 IssueThe Great Organic-Food Fraud There’s no way to confirm that a crop was grown organically. Randy Constant exploited our trust in the labels—and made a fortune. ​By Ian Parker November 8, 2021 Click here to listen to the hour-long audio from Audm and The New Yorker ..read more

Female Farmer Project: the podcast · Farm (and other F words) with Sarah K Mock Why do we love the idea of small family farms? Female Farmer Project's guest, Sarah K Mock says it’s because we’ve been told the stories about family farms from an early age through nursery rhymes and picture books. But does that bucolic ideal exist? Sarah provides an agriculture insider’s critique of the romantic agrarian ideal of the small family farm. She lays bare the shortcomings of that narrative — not all is as virtuous as it seems. In this thought-provoking conversation, Mock challenges the many conceptio ..read more

Among the 200 or so breeds of goats across the United States, the San Clemente Island goats are one of the rarest. Nebraska Public Media's Dennis Kellogg reports on one Nebraska couple that is doing what they can to save them. They get their name from San Clemente Island off the coast of California. There used to be as many as 18,000 of them. But after they overran the island's natural ecosystem, most were eradicated. Now more than 1,000 miles away on a 40-acre farm, Chad and his life partner, John Carroll, are doing everything they can to save the breed at Willow Valley Farms. Contact: Joh ..read more

"Notice the ways Native people are achieving and surviving." - ​Derek DeRosier In Glacier National Park, Misha learns about what it means to be indigenous to a place from Derek DeRosier, Tom Rodgers and David Treuer. She learns about the Blackfeet Nation tribe and their experience with Glacier. Derek then leads her on a tour of the east side of the park, to Two Medicine Valley, and tells her how his dad fought to become a park vendor. Misha also talks to Vivian Wang about what it takes to become a park ranger, and how hard it can be for people of color. Glacier is the land of the Blackf ..read more

On this week's How to Save a Planet episode, we meet two farmers who, at first glance, seem very different. One is a first-generation farmer in upstate New York raising fruits and vegetables for the local community. The other is a third generation farmer in Minnesota who sells commodity crops—corn and soybeans—to big industrial processors. But they share something in common. They’re both bucking modern conventions on how to farm. And they're paying close attention to something that is frequently overlooked: the soil. We explore how making simple changes in the way we farm can harness the incre ..read more