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On GivingTuesday get The Dirt 2024 for $25! NewsMatch — a collaborative movement that supports public-service reporting — is underway! Now through Dec. 31, the next $10,000 in donations we receive will be tripled (and matched 24x if it’s a new monthly gift), all up to $1,000 per donor. Help us raise this $30,000!

Almost half of our budget comes from individual donors, i.e. people like you. And now we need you to dig a little deeper into your pockets so that we can continue to dig deeper into the food system.

How FERN works

When you support us, we want to be able to give something back in return. Donate at least $50 or $5/month and you can receive The Dirt, an annual print collection of our favorite stories. It’s a great way to stay on top of FERN’s essential work on food and agriculture.

We redoubled our efforts to find important, under-covered stories wherever they are.

Cover illustration by Ross MacDonald

The Switchyard Food Issue was published with this biannual literary publication from the University of Tulsa. Featured in this issue was an essay by Top Chef co-host Tom Colicchio on food policy; Theodore Ross’s in-depth interview with Sean Sherman, chef and coowner of Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis, whose cookbook The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen won a James Beard Award in 2018; an investigative feature by Dan Charles about pesticides and the threat to pollinators, which will also be featured in an episode of our upcoming podcast series; and two deeply personal narratives on the social and political issues bound up in food by Siddartha Deb and Jori Lewis. The issue was nominated for a National Magazine Award and two James Beard Awards, winning one. 
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Photo by Terra Fondriest

“The ranching industry’s toxic grass problem” by Robert Langellier, published with Grist. America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue that dominates the region’s pastureland, runs from Missouri and Arkansas to the coast of North and South Carolina. It stays green all winter, allowing cows to graze year round. But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic and causes illness, fever, and severe discomfort in the animals. At long last, scientists and farmers are attacking the problem from different angles to end the scourge of toxic grass once and for all.
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Photo By Karl Gehring/The Denver Post via Getty Images

“Trump said Democrats would take away your hamburgers. He’s the one who might.” was published with The New York Times. FERN Senior Editor Ted Genoways unpacks the history of how meat companies have used vulnerable workers as a source of labor, and what it would mean if the latest such population — recent immigrants, many of them refugees and asylum seekers — were forced out of the country in large numbers.
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We want to keep investigating, explaining and exploring. But we can’t do it without you.

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