Alex Milan Tracy for Underscore
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The dozens of independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan news organizations that make up the Rural News Network are developing the broadest news alliance reporting on rural America. These newsrooms are pursuing coverage that provides a more complete picture of what it means to live and work in these communities.
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LATEST NEWS FROM THE NETWORK
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
We need more Native American restaurants
October 01, 2024
From venison chops to grape dumpling soup, Indigenous foods are central to the American heartland — if only we had more places to eat them.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
The whole dam truth
April 25, 2024
Hydropower projects are celebrated as tools to address the climate crisis. But they are far from climate neutral and the downstream threats to biodiversity and Indigenous sovereignty are significant and growing.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
The ranching industry’s toxic grass problem
March 27, 2024
A quarter of the nation’s cattle eat tall fescue, a non-native grass that slowly poisons them. But ranchers have been hesitant to embrace two very different solutions.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Tribal nations want more control over their food supply
February 21, 2024
Here’s how the farm bill could help.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
The essential workers missing from the farm bill
February 14, 2024
The legislation has long supported farm owners—but not the people fueling their operations.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
The farm bill hall of shame
February 07, 2024
The sometimes tragic, always maddening history of today’s ag-policy fights.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
The Farm Bill Fight
January 31, 2024
A special series in partnership with Mother Jones, explores the debate about what the legislation ought to be and how it’s become ensnared in the nation’s culture wars.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Can $3 billion persuade Black farmers to trust the USDA?
January 08, 2024
The agency’s climate-smart initiative promises to make amends for its long history of discrimination. Early results suggest it won’t be easy.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
A tell-tale tragedy
October 26, 2023
Two Mexican farmworkers died in a trailer fire in North Carolina. Their story illustrates how the nation’s most important agricultural visa program is failing the workers it is supposed to protect.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Alone on the Range
October 03, 2023
The West’s sheepherding industry relies on seasonal workers who toil in brutal conditions.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Why are we paying for crop failures in the desert?
August 09, 2023
Taxpayers are on the hook for heat-related crop losses in parched states like Arizona. That needs to change.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Can Biden’s climate-smart agriculture program live up to the hype?
July 13, 2023
The USDA is paying growers more than $3 billion to adopt practices — like planting cover crops and trees — that many believe can help mitigate climate change.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
A remote Alaska village depended on the snow crab harvest for survival. Then billions of crabs died.
July 05, 2023
The Indigenous people of St. Paul Island face a decision — stay or go?
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
As climate change erodes land and health, one Louisiana tribe fights back
May 22, 2023
The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and its neighbors serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s.
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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Facing the floodwaters in California’s San Joaquin Valley
May 15, 2023
The historically Black town of Allensworth tries to overcome a legacy of racist water policies and prevent a deluge from washing away its community.
RURAL NEWS SPOTLIGHT
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