FERN’s Friday Feed: Fertilizer’s toxic journey
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The true cost of chemical fertilizer
FERN and WWNO’s Sea Change (audio)
The chemical industry is big business in Louisiana. Companies here manufacture plastics, fuels, pesticides, and cleaning products. But one part of the chemical industry that’s often overlooked is the fertilizer business. Chemical fertilizer is a cornerstone of modern farming. It helps grow the food and food products billions of people eat. It’s also causing vast environmental damage. In this episode of WWNO’s Sea Change podcast, you’re going to hear the story of modern fertilizer, and how this powerful concoction of chemicals has radically reshaped how we farm and what we eat. And how it’s poisoning communities, upending livelihoods, and choking the life out of a huge swath of the ocean.
The global and shockingly sustainable lives of wine barrels
The Guardian
“In the alcohol industry, when ageing liquor can easily take decades, the vessels that house them can also become more covetable over the years. In an age of disposable materials and dire news of plastics polluting our environment, reused wooden barrels exist in stark contrast. The lives of barrels are long, shockingly sustainable and currently imperiled by trade war,” writes Kiki Aranita. “Many circumnavigate the globe and end their days in distilleries in remote corners of the world, originating in the forests of Hungary and moving from mountain towns in Canada to distilleries in the Caribbean and Mexico. At Hamilton, new American oak barrels hold fresh distillate, alongside the dinosaurs: French cognac barrels that show their age. They’re gray, stained and a little warped.”
The promise of eggs
Orion Magazine
“Chickens in the news; the sky that most of them will never see is truly falling down. Bird flu, H5N1, has made a sacrificial abattoir of our egg factories; more than twenty million casualties in the first quarter of 2025 alone—and still no resolution in sight. With both government and economy in disarray, ‘the price of eggs’ has become the phrase we use for everything that is now so difficult to afford. Our anxiety has found a home in the image of an egg. In any case, we have not been kind to chickens, having gone with such cool efficiency from henhouses to ‘mass confinement systems,’ and that unkindness has come home to roost. Meanwhile, at the federal level, we are undergoing a parallel degeneration. It’s as if the current administration has taken a lesson in governance from the heads of industrial agriculture. Indeed, as I read about ICE, mass deportations, private prisons, I find it hard to tell where the chicken warehouses leave off and the human ones begin,” writes Jennifer Marysia Landretti. “[W]ith so much at risk and so much to do, the simple fact of an egg is a fortifying meditation. I reclaim a little heart by pondering the promises eggs offer: all that may be born; all that may be reborn.”
Their farm helped stock food pantries. Trump put a stop to that.
The 19th
“Oaks and Sprouts, Tonni and Graham Oberly’s family farm, got the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks just after five o’clock on the first Friday in March. The U.S. Department of Agriculture … was ending a program that gave state, tribal and territorial governments federal dollars to stock food pantries from farms within a 400-mile radius,” writes Amanda Becker. “Last growing season, Oaks and Sprouts had a contract worth up to $25,000 with the program, a significant amount for the small farm. The produce made its way to food pantries in nearby Springfield and Dayton and, from there, to the Ohioans who rely on them to feed themselves and their families … The federal program had also allowed the Oberlys to diversify their farm’s revenue stream beyond the traditional sales to restaurants and at farmer’s markets. It had given them a measure of predictability.”
How getting cows out of the water helped clean up Oklahoma streams
The New York Times
“Grant Victor wasn’t sure what to expect when he decided to fence his cattle off from Horse Creek, which wends through northeast Oklahoma, bisecting his family’s pastures and cropland,” writes Cara Buckley. “[A] century’s worth of bovine traffic had left the creek’s banks muddy and bare, and its waters thick with kicked-up sediment and animal waste. In 2016, Mr. Victor resolved to change that. Working with a conservation program, he installed fencing around Horse Creek, creating a protective riparian buffer, even though it meant keeping his animals off 220 acres, about 6 percent of his family’s land.Today, Horse Creek is no longer on the state’s list of most contaminated waterways. And, thanks to practices such as the ones enacted by Mr. Victor, about 100 Oklahoman streams once polluted by runoff predominantly from farmland have been restored to health. That’s more than in any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.”