A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury. Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The ...

In his memoir, the author courageously shares his story, in particular, his dad’s story and his struggles keeping the dairy farm in Canaseraga, a rural town in Upstate New York. It is a story of ...

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays centered around food. Families gather around full tables, share familiar dishes and express gratitude for the hands that produced them. Being thankful is ...

In 1874, Jupiter Gilliard, who had been enslaved before emancipation, purchased 476 acres of coastal Georgia soil near rural Brunswick. That act of ownership rooted his descendants in the land they ...

For the first time in l00 years the Klamath River is dam free. For thousands of years the Klamath—winding 257 miles from the volcanic Cascade Range in southern Oregon to where it meets the Pacific ...

This is the second story in a two-part series on the public history of trees, centered on the essay collection Branching Out: The Public History of Trees. Read the first part here. Until the 20th ...

There was a time when Iowa mattered. From 1972 to 2020, we hosted the first-in-the-nation caucuses, despite a population that is overwhelmingly white and unabashedly rural. Every four years, the ...

Your house has been robbed. You can’t quite remember if there was an heirloom statue on that shelf or a treasured photo on that bookcase. You know you’ve lost something. You feel violated. And it’s ...

Anna Sekine works as the Midwest Farmland Associate at American Farmland Trust. In this role, she supports programs focused on farmland protection, next-generation land access, and farm transfer ...

International food aid—the food grown by American row crop farmers—has been a hallmark of United States foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. Its untimely end by the Trump administration ...

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish. Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico ...

The following is an excerpt from Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, published by Island Press. You can purchase a copy here. Brenda ...