Tag: farming

After enormous lobbying efforts, Monsanto’s GMO soybeans, treated with Roundup, became the country’s largest export, as cancer rates and other health issues skyrocketed.

Farmers like sixth-generation Illinois farmer Ethan Cox can’t wait for policymakers to protect them from climate change. To survive, they have to adapt their operations now, if they can.

When you live with animals, you collect killing stories.

“My farm connects me to the world, the ground, its air, its water, its fauna, and people. In an introvert-kind-of-way. Which is to say, my-kind-of-way.”

How America stacks the deck against black farmers.

After large corporate farmers started growing nuts in one southeastern Arizona, local residents’ wells started going dry. The situation is only getting worse.

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

A woman makes sand-pear pie with her grandmother and remembers a family ritual.

Is there anything peanuts aren’t good for?

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

The Mississippi River’s infrastructure is aging, and no one can agree who should fix it.

Minister Clarence Jordan founded Koinonia Farm in 1942 to be, in his words, a “demonstration plot for the kingdom of God.” Can it endure in our racially charged modern climate?

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

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

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.

Meet the family turning Las Vegas casino food waste into future meals.

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.

The Economist goes into the frigid north to examine how climate change and economics have endangered the centuries-old relationship between Finn and reindeer.

At Letters From Earth, Andrew Evans celebrates the wonders of farming and crafting clay pots — two occupations based on making something out of dirt with honest labor.

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 […]

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 […]

Modern Farmer appeared in the spring of 2013. After three issues, it won a National Magazine Award; no other magazine had ever won so quickly. According to Gardner, though, Modern Farmer is less a magazine than an emblem of “an international life-style brand.” This is the life style of people who want to “eat food with a better […]

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 […]

A woman who grew up near her grandmother’s farm with a large extended family recalls her childhood, and how things will be different for her children and their children as her family shrinks. (A Best American Essays 2012 notable essay): This shift is evident in our family.  Counting spouses and not counting our cousins’ kids, […]