The Case of the Shrinking Salmon
In “Trouble at sea,” a story published in partnership with bioGraphic, Miranda Weiss explores the reasons why Pacific salmon are shrinking in size. Hatchery salmon, from the booming aquaculture...
View ArticleWhy California’s Farmworkers are in a Food Crisis
In “Extreme weather means less food for California’s farmworkers,” published in collaboration with WBUR’s Here and Now, Teresa Cotsirilos explains that farmworkers who harvest the nation’s food are...
View ArticleCell-Cultured Meat Poses Questions About Cancer
In “Lab-grown meat has a P.R. problem,” published in collaboration with Bloomberg Businessweek, Joe Fassler explains that although leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you...
View ArticleMidwest Tribe Partners with Historical Nemesis to Halt Sacred Plant’s Decline
In “The future of wild rice may depend on an unlikely alliance,” published in collaboration with The Nation, Nancy Averett explains that when University of Minnesota researcher Crystal Ng won a grant...
View ArticleMicroclimates Could Help Pollinators Survive
In the FERN exclusive, “A chilling effect: How farms can help pollinators survive the stress of climate change,” Lela Nargi explains that refugia are viewed as “relatively buffered” from climate...
View ArticleU.S. Policy Traps Migrant Workers in Southern Mexico
In “Our Mango Republic,” a collaboration with The Nation, Esther Honig explains how countless people have been trapped in Tapachula, a sprawling Mexican border town where many of the migrants take...
View ArticleFERN Finds Most Child-Labor Violations in Nation’s Food Sector
For her FERN exclusive story, “The child workers who feed you,” Teresa Cotsirilos dug into investigation data from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and found that more than 75 percent...
View ArticleCalifornia Town Aims to Remove Racist Water Policies
In “Facing the floodwaters in California’s San Joaquin Valley,” a collaboration with KQED’s The California Report, Teresa Cotsirilos digs into the deep-rooted struggles of the historically Black town...
View ArticlePeach Farming with Ghosts
In Lisa Morehouse’s audio story, “Peach farmer ‘Mas’ Masumoto talks about farming with ghosts,” a collaboration with KQED’s The California Report, we learn how labor and lessons can present themselves...
View ArticleLouisiana Tribal Community Faces Climate Change
In “As climate change erodes land and health, one Louisiana tribe fights back,” Barry Yeoman brings us to Dulac, Louisiana, where Devon Parfait, the new chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the...
View ArticleFERN Investigates Police Killing of Meatpacking Worker
Officials at a massive pork plant with a history of labor violations called the cops on a disgruntled employee. Why did he end up dead? In “A police killing on the packing line,” Ted Genoways recounts...
View ArticleFERN Looks at Dark Side of Seaweed Farming
In “Climate savior or ‘Monsanto of the sea’?,” Bridget Huber digs deep into seaweed farming, which is being hyped as a major weapon in the fight against climate change. But skeptics say the rush to...
View ArticleAlaska Community Faced with Snow Crab Fallout
Over the last few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. For her story, “A remote Alaska village depended on the snow crab harvest for survival. Then billions of...
View ArticleUsing Fungi to Mitigate Forest Fires
In his story, “How mushrooms can prevent megafires,” Stephen Rober Miller describes how thinning forests to prevent fires produces a lot of sticks and other debris, which in turn produces a fire risk....
View ArticleWhy a Climate-Smart Ag Program is Complicated
In “Can Biden’s climate-smart agriculture program live up to the hype?,” Gabriel Popkin looks at the reasons why there are both supporters and skeptics of a USDA program that plans to pay growers more...
View ArticleFERN Explains Why Federal Crop Insurance is Currently Flawed
In “Why are we paying for crop failures in the desert?,” Stephen Robert Miller explains to readers that, although extreme heat is not going anywhere, year after year, Southwest farmers keep planting...
View ArticleFERN Uncovers Worker Abuse in Sheepherding Industry
In “Alone on the range,” Teresa Cotsirilos brings readers to the West’s remote mountains and deserts, where we learn about the abuses that sheepherders withstand in an industry “beset by a level of...
View ArticleFERN Looks at an Ag Visa Program That’s Failing Farmworkers
In “A tell-tale tragedy,” Esther Honig and Johnathan Hettinger dig into how the nation’s most important agricultural visa program is failing the workers it is supposed to protect. The story was part...
View ArticleNational Magazine Award finalist: Alone on the range
Alone on the range is a finalist for a 2024 National Magazine Award in the category of Public Interest reporting. This is one of two National Magazine Awards for which FERN is a finalist in 2024. The...
View ArticleNational Magazine Award finalist: Switchyard Food Issue
The Switchyard Food Issue is a finalist for a 2024 National Magazine Award in the category of Single-Topic Issue. This is one of two National Magazine Awards for which FERN is a finalist in 2024. The...
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