This is the second story in a two-part series on the public history of trees, centered on the essay collection Branching Out: The Public History of Trees. Read the first part here. Until the 20th ...

A Wisconsin appeals court has ruled that the state’s Department of Natural Resources has the authority to regulate large-scale animal farms, a blow to big farm groups amid their decades-long fight to ...

Until recently, if you drove down the main street in Cairo, Illinois, a majority Black community at the southernmost point of the state, you wouldn’t have been able to find a grocery store. Like many ...

The following is the fourth installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

Today’s young farmers contain multitudes, as varied as the paths—conventional and unconventional, the adventurous and sometimes tortuous—that lead them into farming. For Iriel Edwards, 25, higher ...

In the mid 1980s, Thomas Eich’s grandparents, who farmed corn and soybeans, enrolled in the newly established Conservation Reserve Program, administered via the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ...

Dustin Watson looks over the pastures and woodlands he grew up on. Behind him is the farmhouse his great-grandfather built, not far from the chicken coops and tractor sheds his grandfather raised ...

The following is the fifth installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and funded ...

The following is an excerpt from Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, published by Island Press. You can purchase a copy here. Brenda ...

In his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024), Austin Frerick identifies contemporary “Barons” in seven different corporations—such as ...

When Americans walk up to the meat case at their local supermarket or grocery store, they are looking for low prices on that package of pork chops, chicken wings or the holiday ham. Cheap food is a ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...