Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 20, 2024

In 1944, International Harvester tested the first mechanical cotton picker on a plantation just south of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains.

Acre 103

Acre Farming Farming Crop 103

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Isaiah White harvests kale at his familys fifth-generation farm in Warren County, where the U.S. When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. Patrick Browns nephew Justice White pauses while harvesting organic purple kale. Across the road, peacocks shriek. They must be pets?

Plantation 144

Plantation Farming Farming Acre 144

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 27, 2023

The food system bears a disproportionate impact on communities of color, ranging from the farmworkers struggling to feed themselves even as they harvest the nation’s produce to the BIPOC farmers who are often shut out from crucial financing and other resources. Here is our best food justice reporting this year.

Food 138

Food Sharecropping Finance Farming 138

Modern Farmer

JULY 16, 2024

Some are even ready to harvest. Even after slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1866, white farmers created their own form of sharecropping called “ cottaging ,” where former enslaved Black people would provide labor in exchange for shelter and crops. Porter’s farm faces another common challenge: he doesn’t own his farmland.

Food 121

Food Farming Farming Agriculture 121

Civil Eats

JUNE 4, 2024

Adeeb: There was a loss of farmland, farm traditions, knowledge, and skills being passed from one generation to the other due to migration. We would harvest things in the morning, prepare them, and they’d be on the table for 3 o’clock. How will the oral history project support that? It was comforting to me.

Food 111

Food Seeding Farming Farming 111

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 31, 2024

Land-trafficking mafias , which operate in every region of Peru, have allowed developers to launder unclaimed swaths of rainforest into legal farmland. It wasn’t much, but they had only to cross the river to hunt wild game, gather native fruits, and harvest natural dyes for pottery and textiles they sold in local markets.

Plantation 126

Plantation Acre Cultivation Crop 126