By Keith Schneider
SUNNYSIDE, Washington – Waters from the snowpack of the Cascade Mountains support orchards, vineyards and dairies here in the Yakima Valley of eastern Washington State, boosting a flourishing farm economy and helping to stock store grocery shelves nationwide.
By Keith Schneider
WEST BEND, Iowa – People searching for ways to limit the toll industrialized American agriculture takes on communities, land, and water may want to make a visit to Clear Creek Acres in northern Iowa.
By Keith Schneider
EDON, OH – For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it has been common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn.
By Keith Schneider
A coalition of environmental organizations faced off against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in federal appellate court on Thursday in the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over the agency’s regulatory approach to water contamination connected to industrial agricultural operations.
By Keith Schneider
A recent state court decision could transform how animal agriculture is regulated in Michigan, and potentially influence how other state and federal regulators oversee the industry’s mammoth waste stream, according to environmental lawyers and activists.
By Keith Schneider
In a rare rebuke to the industrial farm sector, the Michigan Supreme Court this week ruled that state environmental regulators have full authority to require livestock and poultry operations to improve their handling of billions of pounds of manure that contributes to contamination of waterways.
By Keith Schneider
EMMETSBURG, IOWA –Raised in rural Iowa, 71-year-old Maureen Reeves Horsley once considered her tiny hometown in the northwest part of the state to be a blessed space. She recalls a time when the streams here ran clean and the lake water was clear.
By Keith Schneider
VENICE, LA. Kindra Arnesen is a 46-year-old commercial fishing boat operator who has spent most of her life among the pelicans and bayous of southern Louisiana, near the juncture where the 2,350-mile-long Mississippi River ends at the Gulf of Mexico.
By Keith Schneider
Amid increasing scrutiny of a potential link between Iowa farm chemicals and cancer, a new report is generating controversy as it blames rising cancer rates not on the toxins used widely throughout the state, but on something else entirely: binge alcohol consumption.
By Keith Schneider
When directors of the public water utility in Des Moines, Iowa, went to court in 2015 to try to stop toxic farm nutrients from contaminating the city’s drinking water, they knew the federal lawsuit they filed would be seen as not just a desperate step to protect public health, but also a brazen act of defiance that would provoke a ferocious response from Iowa’s powerful farm and political leadership.