During the 2023 harvest season, one of Jake Lieb’s tractors quit working. A week later, his combine stopped working, too. Both were new — and he was locked out from making any repairs himself because of software restrictions embedded in the machines.  Instead, a technician from John Deere was dispatched to diagnose and repair the problems. While waiting for the technician to come out, Lieb fired up a 20-year-old tractor he hadn’t used for harvesting in years. Crops are vulnerable to the weather, and had he not, Lieb could have lost at least a day of harvest. Some of the crop might have d ..read more

At a February legislative hearing, a seemingly mundane bill reforming county zoning procedures drew testimony from a big name: Gov. Jim Pillen.  For those seeking to build projects such as livestock operations, Pillen said, applying for a permit from the county can be “extraordinarily frustrating.” The bill would “take some of the subjectiveness out of this process,” he told the legislative committee. Before becoming governor, Pillen had gone before county boards seeking permission to build his hog farms as he grew a Nebraska pig empire.  Gov. Jim Pillen He usually succeeded. When h ..read more

In 1999, a federal judge ruled, in what’s known as the Pigford settlement, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against Black farmers for years. The agency had systematically denied Black farmers assistance to grow their operations, the judge found.  Despite the ruling, Black farmers still struggle to access federal assistance at the same clip as their white counterparts. In 2021, the USDA rejected 42% of loan applications from Black farmers but only 9% of white farmers’ applications, according to CNN. The discrimination has had long lasting effects. The size of farm ..read more

This story was originally published in The Gazette. Iowa is the No. 1 corn-producing state. We also lead the nation in production of pork, eggs and ethanol. But another state ranking has gotten more attention in recent years: Iowa has the fastest-growing rate of new cancers in the nation and the second-highest cancer rate overall, behind Kentucky. Iowa’s stubbornly-high cancer rate can’t be blamed on just one thing, but oncologists and public health researchers agree it’s time to look more closely at Iowa’s top industry to see how it might be contributing. “If you did an aerial map of Iowa, w ..read more

Let’s state the obvious. Nutrient pollution is a massive problem in U.S. meat processing facilities that discharge millions of pounds of phosphorus and nitrogen into the nation’s waterways each year. Within the Environmental Protection Agency’s industrial category, meat and poultry product (MPP) facilities are the nation’s highest phosphorus and second-highest nitrogen polluters.  You would think the EPA has stringent regulations to turn off the Big Meat nutrient pollution fire hose.  But no. The last time EPA updated nutrient pollution standards for the nation’s largest meat proces ..read more

This story was originally published by Grist. Sometimes climate change appears where you least expect it — like the grocery store. Food prices have climbed 25% over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked by the growing cost of staples like beef, sugar, and citrus.  While many factors, like supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, have contributed to this increase, extreme heat is already raising food prices, and it’s bound to get worse, according to a recent study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The analysis found that heatflation could ..read more

This story was originally published by Grist and the Food & Environment Reporting Network. 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 slo ..read more

The art of maple syrup production flows through generations of Dan Potter’s family history. His great-grandfather bought the family farm in rural Iowa in the late 1880s and cleared the land for strawberries, clay and whiskey production. Eventually, he transitioned to making maple syrup to add to his whiskey. That started a 140-year-old tradition that has persisted through the Civil War, the Great Depression and both world wars. Potter opened his own maple syrup company with his wife and three daughters in 2009. Great River Maple, in Garnavillo, Iowa, is now among the state’s most prolific syr ..read more

This story was originally published by the Food and Energy Reporting Network and Mother Jones. For years, the Oneida Nation has been growing crops and raising cattle and buffalo on its 65,000-acre reservation near Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now, some of that food is doing more than nourishing people: It’s helping undo centuries of government overreach. As part of a pilot program included in the 2018 farm bill, the tribe is using federal dollars to buy food grown on the reservation and by other nearby Native producers and distributing it for free to low-income members of its tribe and another, the ..read more

This story was originally published by Barn Raiser. Throughout the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 105th annual national convention in Salt Lake City this year, organizers projected a video on the big screen of the main presentation room beckoning viewers to “new frontiers” in American agriculture. One clip showed a farmer surrounded by his children as he described the next frontier as a return to the “old” frontier — what he described as restoring the “rural, family values” that “made America great.” More than 175 years after Brigham Young and the Mormon pioneers settled the Salt Lake Vall ..read more