Tag: agriculture

By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.

How California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns.

Even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, California farmers plan to grow food for a living. So what will the future California grow?

Is there anything peanuts aren’t good for?

Kansas is great at growing wheat, but growing wheat hasn’t been great for Kansas.

An interview with Mark Arax about the two decades he spent writing about the San Joaquin Valley empire of Lynda and Stuart Resnick.

Taxpayers have helped Stewart and Lynda Resnick turn an irrigated desert into a dangerous and lucrative agricultural gamble.

Blueberry growing is popular around tiny Covert, Michigan, but how do these farmers of color keep their kids farming the land?

Cultivating crops led to permanent settlements, but also greed and exploitation. Was it all worth it?

Who’s moving America’s (1.3 billion pounds of) cheese? The Dairy Management Institute

TheHudson Valley offers a glimpse of the ways deportations will effect America’s farm economy and food system.

Nevada’s “cow cops” work a unique beat where crimes range from cattle rustling, bovine homicide, and animal abuse.

Fifty years after he published Oranges, one writer traces McPhee’s story to Florida to assess the state of American citrus.

A dearth of facilities able to process small farmers’ animals keeps costs up and prices high.

In this oral history, a produce truck driver and former lettuce worker recounts the sexual harassment she faced while working in the fields of Salinas Valley, California.

In this oral history, a former sheepherder describes the loneliness and medical hardship he experienced while tending sheep in California’s Central Valley.

What happens when your chickens are killed by predators protected by law? At The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Williams reports on the farming hardships posed by bald eagles and what one family farm in Bluffon, Georgia, is trying to do about it.

Matthew Berger explores the evolution and the history of salmon aquaculture for Nautilus.

In the California Sunday Magazine, Tessa Stuart writes the gripping story of a criminal who worked the people who work the fields in California’s rural interior, and the detective agency who raced to catch him. The story has all the markings of a Netflix original series, except in place of drugs or gold, the loot is […]

This “safer bet” is where the second generation of Portland’s food industry intersects with the region’s commitment to density in the face of growth. Micro restaurants and food halls celebrate small spaces. Their inherent informality appeals to diners who treat dining out as an everyday form of entertainment. The small, turnkey spaces make it easier […]

Although it felt better to raise cattle that weren’t drugged up, economically it was hard to rationalize the decision. Sales barns in the Midwest feed into the industrial agricultural system and make no distinction between grass-fed beef and doped up beef. A farmer just pulls his trailer up to the sales barn, drops the cattle […]

California produces 29% of the world’s strawberries, but the ample water, cheap labor, chemicals and climate that support the state’s output are changing. In Bloomberg Business, Dune Lawrence writes about a breeder at Driscoll’s who’s trying create a strawberry that requires fewer chemicals, less water and less oversight. Having spent decades building a brand known […]

In Li’s luggage, [FBI] agents found two large Pop Weaver microwave popcorn boxes. Buried under the bags of unpopped snack kernels were roughly 300 tiny manila envelopes, all cryptically numbered—2155, 2403, 20362. Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye’s luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually […]

The illustrated story of California, and what happens when the water runs out.

When most of us think of California’s irrigated acres, we visualize lush fields growing tomatoes, artichokes, strawberries, and grapes. But in California, the biggest user of underground water, more irrigation water is used for feed crops and pasture than for all these specialty crops combined. In fact, 42 percent of California’s irrigation goes to produce […]

If it’s not for sale here, Nicaraguans say, then you can’t buy it anywhere.

Myers contends that, when applied to plants, patents are stifling. They discourage sharing, and sharing is the foundation of successful breeding. That’s because his work is essentially just assisting natural evolution: He mates one plant with another, which in turn makes new combinations of genes from which better plants are selected. The more plants there […]

The global almond boom is being fueled in part by sleek marketing campaigns that have made almonds the nut of choice for consumers. Subway stations in China are blanketed with billboards proclaiming almonds to be a heart-healthy snack that makes people “perpetually feel good” (almond exports to China have more than doubled in the past […]