Civil Eats

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Most of America’s farms are dependent on prodigious amounts of fossil fuels at every stage of production. From planting to harvest, farm machinery such as tractors and combines burn diesel fuel to churn out the raw materials for our food system. On-farm activities like irrigation rigs also require a lot of generated power.

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Pesticide Fertilizer Industrial Agriculture Food 143

The Equation

MAY 11, 2023

The cause of the tragedy, according to Illinois State Police , was “excessive winds blowing dirt from farm fields across the highway leading to zero visibility.” This disaster should serve as a sobering reminder that policymakers and the agriculture industry need to do more to adapt to our changing climate.

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Daily Yonder

JUNE 28, 2024

Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Shane Hamilton is a historian of American agriculture and agribusiness who teaches at the University of York in the United Kingdom. How’d you decide to focus on the industries that cropped up around farming, instead of the act of farming itself?

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Daily Yonder

SEPTEMBER 23, 2024

This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Modern Farmer , a a nonprofit covering equity and resiliency in the food system. She later became the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Toppenish Creek , which advocates for improved oversight of industrial agriculture.

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Food Tank

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Through this film, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) advocates for increased investment in rural communities who are under constant threat from the climate crisis. food system, detailing the human costs of policies that favor profit-driven agriculture. Watch it on YouTube. Watch it on Netflix.

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Food Tank

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Industrial agriculture and associated land-use changes are the biggest drivers of food system emissions. From mega-cities to small towns, local governments are fostering close connections with their residents and putting health and social justice at the heart of their food and climate policies, while protecting vulnerable communities.

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Food Tank

JUNE 10, 2024

The top 1 percent of world’s largest farms now control 70 percent of land, leaving smaller-scale farmers behind. Green grabbing, in which governments and businesses take land for projects including wind farms, tree-planting, carbon offsetting and sequestration, or clean fuel generation has also exacerbated the land squeeze.

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The Lunatic Farmer

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

In the last couple of years, a steady stream of visitors, many in rented motor homes, have stopped at our farm to walk our fields and dream. Many have zero rural experience, connections, or history. We need more people in rural America to make a critical mass that will keep the livestock, equipment, and feed suppliers in business.

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The Equation

MARCH 4, 2024

Railways and natural resources were diverted away from Allensworth to white-owned interests and farm holdings. Farms that use extractive agriculture usually are outside the official community line, and therefore they pay no taxes to the communities they pollute. a century ago found their way to Allensworth.

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Agriculture Agriculture Pesticide Ruralism 118

The Equation

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

These farmers span generations and work farms from Texas to South Carolina, and they’ve gathered to talk about the issues facing them. Heirs’ property affects homes as well as farms, but it was a new issue for me. My great grandparents worked very hard to acquire land in rural Arkansas. Can the system be fixed?

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Civil Eats

DECEMBER 3, 2024

Through captivating case studies, Thurow’s hopeful book showcases farmers who have boldly gone against the grain of modern agriculture orthodoxy and are instead embracing regenerative practices—like agroecology and permaculture—that restore soil health, enhance biodiversity, and promote resilience against climate change.

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The Equation

JUNE 20, 2023

Farmworkers face many hazards while performing the labor that props up the $1.264 trillion US food and farm economy, yet a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found that federal agencies focused on agriculture and health invested an average of only $16.2 5138 (Industrial Agricultural Accountability Act), and S.3285

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Food Tank

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Buy from small farms that support resilience and food sovereignty. “Big farms don’t build resilience to a system,” says Million Belay, the General Coordinator for Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, during a discussion at the Food & Agriculture Pavilion. The status quo isn’t going to do it.”

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Food Finance Agriculture Agriculture 59

Food Environment and Reporting Network

OCTOBER 24, 2024

It’s an all-too-familiar story for mission-driven agritech startups, one that illuminates the bargains even the most idealistic of entrepreneurs must strike to survive in a savage industry. Agriculture’s cycles are seasonal rather than quarterly, and its best ideas may need many years to bear fruit.

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Pesticide Crop Agriculture Agriculture 86

ATTRA

JANUARY 30, 2024

had — with my permission granted over cell phone — left for the two-hour drive back to our motel in Keene where we were giving a week-long Armed to Farm workshop to military veterans scheduled to start the next day. Describing and illuminating this web is the “warp and woof” of sustainable agriculture. Had I heard of it?

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Daily Yonder

MARCH 14, 2024

Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick Island Press (March 26, 2024) Few books about America’s industrial agriculture system and food industry uncover the billionaires behind its biggest corporations. And it is no accident.

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Civil Eats

APRIL 8, 2024

When farmer Joshua Manske heard about the acquisition of an Iowa fertilizer plant by Koch Industries in December, he saw it as a “microcosm of what’s going on nationally.” Because corn requires nitrogen fertilizer to grow, Manske is concerned that further consolidation of the fertilizer industry will drive his input prices up more.

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Modern Farmer

APRIL 15, 2024

Community organizers, under the group name Citizens Protecting Rural Wisconsin , argued that digesters aren’t the solution that they seem to be. A new report by Friends of the Earth US and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) backs up that sentiment. This plan aims to develop the industry further.

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The Equation

MAY 9, 2024

For example, Frerick recounts how the ubiquitous strawberry brand Driscoll’s doesn’t actually grow any strawberries, but rather outsources farming, and with it, accountability for labor and environmental issues. While the latest USDA Census of Agriculture indicates that family-owned and operated farms accounted for 95% of all U.S.

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Sustainable Food Trust

MAY 31, 2023

Avoid the never-ending scroll on streaming platforms and instead refer to our list of recommended food and farming films, especially selected, watched and reviewed by the SFT team for your viewing pleasure. He has been born and grown in the Valley and his wish from when he was a small boy, is that he wanted his own farm.

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Modern Farmer

AUGUST 13, 2024

As a small farmer who formerly worked with communities to resist large corporate farms, she knew a lot about how industrial chicken operations could affect a community. Just three years earlier, Kimbirauskas had gotten wind that Foster Farms was planning to move into her own home of Linn County, Oregon and decided to fight back.

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Farming Farming Manure Industrial Agriculture 108

Civil Eats

JUNE 20, 2024

To ring in the first day of summer, we at Civil Eats want to offer you a list of food and farming books we think are worth your time and attention. Brazil’s national requirement that 30 percent of school food ingredients be sourced from local and regional family farms helps empower and fund women agroecological producers.

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Modern Farmer

AUGUST 13, 2024

As a small farmer who formerly worked with communities to resist large corporate farms, she knew a lot about how industrial chicken operations could affect a community. Just three years earlier, Kimbirauskas had gotten wind that Foster Farms was planning to move into her own home of Linn County, Oregon and decided to fight back.

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Farming Farming Manure Industrial Agriculture 82

Civil Eats

NOVEMBER 18, 2024

In 2014, Lowell and Evelyn Trom learned that a farmer wanted to build a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) across the road from their family farm in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. By then, there were already 10 CAFOs within a 3-mile radius of their 760-acre farm, so they knew the stench the facility would bring.

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Civil Eats

JULY 9, 2024

The display exemplified how, as Land O’Lakes’ annual report laid out earlier that year, the agricultural giant is marketing enrollment in a climate-smart farming initiative alongside its biggest profit driver: pesticides and seeds. They’re getting a tremendous amount of data from the farmer-participants.

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Civil Eats

MARCH 31, 2025

Meanwhile, at an apple orchard in upstate New York, immigrant farmworkers signed the first United Farm Workers (UFW) union contract in the state, joining the legendary California-based union founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Compared to other industries, agriculture had one of the lowest rates of all, at 1.4

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Food Tank

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Yet these qualities are their superpowers, making these food systems resilient, nutritious, and far more secure than industrial agriculture. Industrial agricultures focus on growing these nine crops contributes significantly to deforestation and ecosystem degradation.

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Food Industrial Agriculture Harvester Harvest 88

Food Tank

JANUARY 31, 2025

Over the years, there have been many attempts to reform farming and food policy in sub-Saharan Africa, but many have not succeeded. in his book Decolonizing African Agriculture. He finds the culprit to be colonial models of agriculture science, and argues for a place-based agroecological approach.

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Food Agroecology Agriculture Agriculture 111

Food Politics

AUGUST 15, 2023

I try to keep up with what’s going on with the Farm Bill, up for renewal soon. This Farm Bill Could Reshape the Food System. BY LISA HELD, AUGUST 9, 2023 Reauthorizing the farm bill every five years generally involves contentious debates and delays as legislators and lobbyists hash out a wide range of competing priorities.

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Farming Farming Food Agriculture 189

National Young Farmers Coalition

JUNE 26, 2024

The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2024 recently passed by the House Agriculture Committee does not serve the new generation of farmers and ranchers in this country. But first, let’s break down all the red, green, and yellow flags included in the first draft.

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Civil Eats

AUGUST 9, 2023

Reauthorizing the farm bill every five years generally involves contentious debates and delays as legislators and lobbyists hash out a wide range of competing priorities. More than 600 farm, nutrition, and public health organizations support expanding the program.

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Daily Yonder

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Now, the disappearing water is threatening more than just agriculture. Rural communities are facing dire futures where water is no longer a certainty. Across the Ogallala, small towns and cities built around agriculture are facing a twisted threat: The very industry that made their communities might just eradicate them.

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Civil Eats

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

Although most people assume that the federal organic standards dictate exactly how farm animals are raised, language in the standards has long left wiggle room on issues like how much space each animal is given and how “outdoor access” is defined. The lawmakers’ offices did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Civil Eats either.

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