Climate Change Is Making It Much Harder to Be a Young Farmer
A young woman picks fruit.Dmitry Feoktistov/Zuma This story was originally published by the Food and Environment Reporting Network. With this season’s severe flooding, raging wildfires, and delayed planting, many of the country’s farmers are struggling to adjust as climate change sets in. Yet young and beginning farmers face unique challenges, farmers and advocates say, with…
Waiter, There’s a Climate Surcharge in My Soup
Mother Jones illustration; Getty American restaurant diners don’t usually blink before adding an extra 15-20 percent tip onto their bills. In recent years, San Francisco’s eaters have even (mostly) grown accustomed to paying up to six percent extra for dinner to offset the cost of the city’s mandated healthcare program. Starting in January, at a…
The Latest Green New Deal for Farmers Would Restructure Everything About How They Make Money
eclipse_images/Getty The Green New Deal, the climate-change-fighting policy framework proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) nearly a year ago, laid down bold goals for transforming agriculture: It called for a “10-year national mobilization” to “eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector” while “supporting family farming.” The plan…
These Emails Show a Trump Official Helping Her Former Chemical Industry Colleagues
The Department of Agriculture building in Washington, DC.Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images This story was published originally by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. In 2017, Dow Chemical scored a long-sought-after…
Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election?
Marco Cibola On an October morning, two men and a woman wearing cowboy hats, bearing American flags, and sitting atop horses rode into a windowless conference room in the depths of a Ramada Inn on the edge of Omaha. When they reached the front of the room and faced the crowd of about 500 ranchers,…
Cory Booker Just Went All-In Against Factory Farming and the Meat Industry
As his presidential bid struggles to gain traction, Sen. Cory Booker (D.-N.J.) is out with a bold new bill, introduced Dec. 16, that proposes a serious crackdown on two powerful industries: meat and dairy. It might seem like a strange thing move for a candidate seeking to increase his broad appeal in a meat-loving nation—especially…