Hot Farm

American food politics are a mess. The traditional forces driving policy in agriculture and nutrition have been wiped away, and ordinary people are struggling to figure out who is in charge, what they're up to, and why. Every two weeks, Forked hosts Helena Bottemiller Evich of Food Fix and Theodore Ross FERN's Editor-in-chief cut through the confusion, providing context and analysis, hopefully leaving you feeling less… well, forked. New episodes every two weeks, from the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

In 1910, Black farmers owned as many as 16 million acres of American farmland. Today that figure has plummeted. Between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost an estimated 90 percent of their farmland to violent land theft and discrimination. In this episode, courtesy of the FoodPrint podcast “What you're eating,” Jerusha Klemperer interviews Brea Baker, author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft And The Modern Movement For Black Land Ownership, who explored this history through her own family's loss and resilience. 

The chemical industry is a cornerstone of modern American farming. It helps grow the food billions of people eat. It's also causing vast environmental damage. In this episode of REAP/SOW, produced in collaboration with WWNO's Sea Change podcast, you're going to hear the story of synthetic 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. Reported by Garrett Hazelwood and Eric Schmid, hosted by WWNO's Carlyle Calhoun and FERN's Teresa Cotsirilos.

Theodore Ross and Helena Bottemiller Evich work through the tumultuous nomination process for Surgeon General. Donald Trump's first nominee withdrew (questions about her medical and anti-vaxx credentials) and the newest one, Casey Means, has been branded a “Marxist tree hugger” by Laura Loomer. (Questions also remain about her anti-vaxxness). Conversation addresses the split within the groups backing HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – anti-Big Food versus anti-vaccine – “the big questions” about government being posed by the Trump administration; and in a sign of hope – MAHA members meet with public health experts and don't hate each other.

FERN editor-in-chief Theodore Ross talks to Genoways about his new book, Tequila Wars, which is an extraordinary exploration of the little-known – and often bloody history – of Jose Cuervo. Cuervo's life, and his struggle to bring stability and prosperity to his industry during the profound disruptions of the Mexican revolutionary era, is an epic tale. This new book pulls Cuervo's name off the bottle and pours it into real life. 

Is it possible that RFK Jr. believes autism research can be done so fast because he already thinks he knows what those causes of autism are? Other topics include: RFK Jr. “hitting his stride” after attending the funeral of a child who died of measles. How many people have been laid off at HHS and why doesn't anybody know? Bipartisan bonhomie on the issue of plant-based milk, in a Senate proposal that almost no one thinks will pass. MAHA anti-vaxxers would rather RFK Jr. forget about food.

Americans increasingly rely on processed food products as key parts of their everyday meals, even as scientists are just starting to scratch the surface in understanding how these food products influence our health. Now, these products have reached the political discourse. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has targeted ultraprocessed foods as a key part of his plan to “Make America Healthy Again.” As part of FERN's special series in partnership with Inverse, reporter Claire Maldarelli interviewed nutritionist and public health expert Marion Nestle.

The premiere of FERN's newest podcast looks at how RKF Jr. is making waves on food policy.

This is a story about how a single TikTok video, taped in 2023 outside a meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado would change the lives of hundreds of Haitian immigrants, and embroil JBS – the world's largest meatpacking company – in a controversy over mistreating workers. Reported by FERN senior producer Ted Genoways and produced in partnership with Reveal, this episode dives deep into a poorly understood part of the food system, which is depended on foreign-born workers the government now seems intent on deporting.

This is an engaging conversation on urban pollinators taped live during the Buzzkill celebration in New York City on March 3, 2025, moderated by Sewell Chan, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, with Buzzkill host Teresa Cotsirilos, Sara Hobel, executive director of the Horticultural Society of New York, and Rebecca Louie, executive director of the Bee Conservancy.

The Golden State's annual almond harvest shows what happens when biodiversity collapses and bees become a commodity valuable enough to steal.

Nearly all tequila is made from cloned plants that are vulnerable to species collapse. In Mexico, a small group of people is trying to change that – and protect an endangered, nectar-slurping, agave-pollinating bat that's only three inches long.

A suburban couple was passionate about pollinators, native plants, and living in harmony with nature. Their neighbors were not impressed. This “battle of the backyard” turned out to have national implications.

White settlers viewed farmland as a resource to be exploited, while Indigenous people saw it as a partnership for mutual benefit. Now, a Native American tribe is solving today's environmental problems and helping pollinators with ancient techniques.

In Nebraska, a researcher's bee colonies kept dying, and the evidence pointed to the ethanol plant next door – and a food system built on pesticides.

Americans stepped up to do something about dying bees. But what if all those backyard colonies are making the problem worse? In Buzzkill's premiere episode, we take an in-depth look at whether raising domesticated bees, especially in cities, is harming the wild species we need to preserve biodiversity.

We're in the middle of a full-blown biodiversity crisis: American honeybee populations have declined by 90 percent in the last two decades. It's not rocket science. How we produce our food is killing off the very pollinators that food relies on. But don't panic, because it is not too late to fix this – and Buzzkill will show you how. Premiering January 28. 2025.

Here's a thing you may not know about the Transcontinental Railroad: It helped turn California into an agricultural powerhouse – transforming the food system – and it also galvanized a series of Civil Rights victories. This episode, reported by FERN contributor Lisa Morehouse, was produced in partnership with “California Foodways” and KQED's alifornia Report” podcast.

Nic Theisen and his wife, Sara, operate a small but bustling farm in northern Michigan, growing flowers and vegetables with the help of a large team of farmworkers. It's backbreaking work, the farm hardly makes a profit… and Nic's a little surprised he's doing this at all. It's real life on a small farm. This episode, originally entitled “Labor of Mixed Emotions” is courtesy of the “Points North” podcast, and was originally aired on September 13th.

California transports water to Central Valley farmers through a complex network of reservoirs, aqueducts, and canals. This water system is controversial… and without constant maintenance, it might collapse. For REAP/SOW, reporter Lisa Morehouse, host of the “California Foodways” podcast, profiles California's irrigation canal divers. This episode was produced in partnership with “California Foodways” and KQED's “California Report” podcast.

Boyce Upholt's report on the environmental threat to redfish on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana anchors this episode of REAP/SOW. It dives deep into the cultural history of this fish that was made globally famous by Paul Prudhomme's blackened redfish dish, while also engaging with the modern-day politics driving how much – if at all – it should be taken from the water. This episode was produced in partnership with WWNO's “Sea Change” podcast. 

Los Angeles was running out of water in the early 1900s, and Payahuunadü, "land of flowing water" in the Nüümü language, had lots of it. City officials hatched a plan to take the water from what white settlers had renamed the Owens Valley. Today, about a third of L.A.'s water comes from Payahuunadü and other parts of the Eastern Sierra, and many of its streams and lakes are mostly gone. FERN staff writer and REAP/SOW host Teresa Cotsirilos digs into Indigenous efforts to forge a modern resolution of this water conflict. This episode was produced in partnership with KQED's California Report.

This episode, courtesy of the podcast “What you're eating,” heads to Maine to investigate PFAS, a category of chemicals known as “forever chemicals” because they don't break down over time. Found in everything from pizza boxes to rain jackets, PFAS is now being discovered in our farms, our food, and in our bodies. Originally released in September 2023, we hear from family farmers Fred and Laura Stone about how these chemicals got into their ground – and what we have to do to get them out.

David “Mas” Masumoto says he farms with ghosts. This episode of REAP/SOW is a FERN/KQED California Report partnership, telling the story of a Japanese-American farming family that's survived generations of discrimination. Masumoto's small organic farm just south of Fresno, California is on land that's been in his family for decades. In 2012, he uncovered a secret about his family that showed him how truly resilient and strong they were. Reported by longtime FERN contributor Lisa Morehouse as part of her California Foodways project, this episode was originally produced in 2023.

In a small fishing village in Mexico, Belen Delgado made a discovery that would change his life: a massive cache of callo de hacha, a large black scallop that's one of the most prized species in the Gulf of California. Years of overfishing had depleted the area's fish and seafood, and Belen knew his discovery could change his village's economic future. But reaching the scallops was only the first challenge: Belen would also have to protect it. Originally released in 2022, this is a partnership between FERN and Snap Judgment.

FERN contributor Ted Genoways interviews Jori Lewis and Siddhartha Deb, two writers taking on popular foods and their fraught cultural history – the racist cultural history of the watermelon, and the Hindu nationalist politics of beef in India. The final installment of a collaboration between FERN and Switchyard, a magazine and podcast from the University of Tulsa and Public Radio Tulsa.

FERN Editor-in-chief Theodore Ross interviews Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, co-owner of Owamni, a James-Beard-Award winning restaurant in Minneapolis that is decolonizing food by using only indigenous ingredients and cooking techniques. Part 2 of a collaboration between FERN and Switchyard, a magazine and podcast from the University of Tulsa and Public Radio Tulsa.

Top Chef star Tom Colicchio sits down with longtime FERN contributor Ted Genoways for an in-depth conversation with the acclaimed celebrity chef. Part 1 of a collaboration between FERN and Switchyard, a magazine and podcast from the University of Tulsa and Public Radio Tulsa.

REAP/SOW: dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment, is the latest audio project from the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent, non-profit news organization. Learn about what you can expect and check out the trailer for our upcoming limited series, BUZZKILL!

From our friends at Climavores: The eat local movement is huge. Bumper stickers in liberal towns across the U.S. tell us to “Eat local” or ask “Who's your farmer?” But eating local food may be wildly overrated when it comes to climate change.  When we look at how foods are produced, transportation accounts for less than 10% of carbon emissions. So should we abandon farmers' markets for big grocery store chains?  In this episode, Mike and Tamar break down the real carbon footprint of local food and ask whether the value of supporting local, small-scale farmers outweighs the climate benefit of not buying local (spoiler alert: Tamar says yes. Mike says no). They also dive into the history of the local food movement and explore why it's gained such traction. Have a question about food and climate change for Mike and Tamar? Leave a message on the Climavores hotline at (508) 377-3449. Or email us at climavores@postscriptaudio.com. We might feature your question on a future episode.

We have a bonus episode from a show called “How to Save a Planet,” a Spotify Original podcast produced by Gimlet Media. This show looks at climate change from the lens of — OK, so what do we do about it? The episode we're running takes on one of the biggest climate issues in agriculture, Beef. And it asks whether adopting a plant-based diet would fight global warming. So should we all go vegetarian? To answer that question, How to Save a Planet looks at the American food system, regenerative farming, and, well, eating. Hint: it's complicated.

More than a fourth of our food, including most of our fruits and vegetables, comes from California. This is due in large part to its Mediterranean climate, which means it has long hot summers and mild winters. For decades, water was plentiful in California. The snow would melt in the Sierra Nevada mountains, rivers would fill, and farmers could tap into those rivers to water their crops. But climate change is upending these advantages and forcing us to find other places to grow some of the food that has long come from California. In this episode, producer Travis Lux takes a deep dive into one of those places: the mid-Mississippi Delta, an area that includes parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi. And into the story of one Arkansas farmer, Shawn Peebles. Over the last decade, Peebles went from losing his commodity farm to debt, to running a 7,000-acre organic produce farm that could be a blueprint for The New California.

In this episode, we consider what farmers grow—and whether that, too, can change. Producer Rachel Yang introduces us to Don Wyse, who leads a research program at the University of Minnesota that is developing 16 new or improved crops designed to thrive in a world with an unpredictable climate. Yang drills down into one of those crops, a grain called Kernza, a type of wheatgrass. Unlike corn and wheat, which are annual crops whose roots are in the ground only a short time, Kernza is a perennial. You plant it, harvest it, and next year it grows back. So Kernza develops super dense roots that can reach 10 feet into the earth, requiring less water, locking a lot of carbon into the soil, and slurping up twice as much fertilizer as annual wheat, thereby preventing runoff and nitrogen pollution. It is a climate-mitigating super plant. But for perennials like Kernza to replace annual grains, they need to be profitable for farmers to grow. Which means there needs to be a market for those grains. As Yang explains, the Land Institute in Kansas, mission control for Kernza development, received a $10 million grant from the USDA in 2020 to start scaling up Kernza from specialty crop to staple grain. That money has people building out a supply chain by experimenting with Kernza: farmers farming it, millers milling it, and bakers baking it for eaters to eat. Everyone along this supply chain is trying to figure out how to deal with the challenges of this new grain.

The majority of American farmers don't believe man-made climate change is real. In this episode, producer Dana Cronin introduces us to some statistically typical American farmers—older, white, male—who grow corn and soybeans. Not for food we eat but as ingredients for processed foods, as feed for livestock, and to make ethanol. One of those farmers, Lin Warfel, may be unconvinced about man-made climate change, but as we learn, farmers like Lin are practical above all else. If doing something differently makes farming and financial sense, they're likely to embrace it. That's how Warfel came to be involved in a farmer-led initiative called Saving Tomorrow's Agriculture Resources, STAR for short. The idea is to change farming practices in ways that safeguard the soil—the foundation of a farmer's livelihood—for the next generation to farm. But many of the practices endorsed by STAR also help reduce carbon emissions, even if that isn't the reason the farmers adopt them. It's the kind of voluntary, meet-them-where-they-are strategy that the USDA and others hoping to convince farmers to join the climate fight say it will take to enlist the unconvinced.

More than 30 years ago, after a drought wiped out his commodity crops, Dave Bishop changed the way he farmed. It was 1988, the same summer that a scientist named James Hansen told Congress that human activity was causing “global warming,” unofficially launching the climate-change era. While Bishop's neighbors vowed that next year would be better, Bishop decided that he couldn't go on doing the same thing. He started diversifying the crops he grew and replacing chemical fertilizer with manure. Over the next decade he kept asking himself, “What else can I do?” He began selling what he grew directly to consumers—something virtually unheard of in farm country back then. He didn't consider what he was doing a crusade against climate change, but rather a way to break free of a system that was squeezing farmers from both ends—forcing them to grow only a handful of commodity crops and sell those crops to a handful of big buyers who set the prices. In this episode, producer Eve Abrams uses Bishop's story to explore what some farmers in the Midwest are doing to combat climate change—from cover cropping to agroforestry. We need more Dave Bishops if we are going to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions coming from U.S. agriculture. But as Abrams makes clear, change is hard. “Once you have an entrenched system the resistance to change is unbelievable,” Bishop tells her.

Over four episodes, host Eve Abrams and her team travel the Midwest, engaging with farmers who are confronting the difficult reality of climate change—increasingly extreme floods and heat—including those who don't believe they're part of the problem. We also meet the scientists who are developing new crops that are better suited to an unpredictable climate, and the people who are trying to convince farmers and consumers to embrace those crops. And we get a detailed look at one possible future for agriculture in America: As California dries out and heats up, people are asking if other regions of the country can take up the slack. Part 1 coming April 12.