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 99

Acre Crop Farming Farming 99

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Isaiah White harvests kale at his familys fifth-generation farm in Warren County, where the U.S. Photo credit: Cornell Watson) Ideally, wed get this sweet corn in the ground today, he says, indicating a bag of organic seed and a nearby half-acre plot of loose brown soil. 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.

Food 138

Food Sharecropping Finance Farming 138

Civil Eats

JUNE 4, 2024

Traveling through Appalachia, Tessa Desmond and her team kept hearing the seed stories. He had overheard Desmond discussing seeds with his neighbor. People have hung on to seeds even when they aren’t actively planting and tending them,” says Desmond. We’ve included audio samples of oral histories from the project.

Food 111

Food Seeding Farming Farming 111

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 31, 2024

Seed funds came from wealthy friends and friends of friends, some of whom told me they hadn’t fully appreciated what they were supporting. A million palm seeds were soon imported from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ivory Coast. “Oh, f**k,” he remembered thinking. Now, those forests were being cleared.

Plantation 125

Plantation Acre Cultivation Crop 125