For decades, evolutionary biologists pointed to such examples to cast hybridization as hapless—‘rare, very unsuccessful, and not an important evolutionary force,’ Sandra Knapp, a plant taxonomist ...

I]n recent years, the big packaged food brands that dominated American pantries and refrigerators for decades are struggling as consumers spend less on brand-name cookies, spaghetti sauce and ...

FERN’s Friday Feed is taking a break this week, but we still wanted to make a few reading recommendations – and let you know about a cool event we were part of. Last week, FERN’s ...

Even before Donald Trump retook the White House, US policymakers had created a paradox of plenty in the nation’s agricultural system: environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food ...

With solar energy becoming more common, local officials should consider agrivoltaics, which combine solar panels and agricultural production on the same land, when drafting or amending ordinances on… ...

We released the newest episode of Forked, our podcast on food politics and policy, earlier this week. It tries to reckon with what the One Big Beautiful Act — heretofore known as OBBA — will mean for ...

My most recent Editor’s Desks have been about FERN’s innovations — podcasts, special series, multiformat distribution, and more. But today I’m writing to you about something very old-fashioned and ...

As Tim Walz took the stage at the Astro Theater in the Omaha suburb of La Vista on Saturday afternoon, the crowd roared with approval. Nearly 2,500 people were packed inside the auditorium, and ...

“The notorious barn cat — perched atop a tractor, chasing mice, napping on bales of hay — was a sight once seen on virtually any American farm. Beloved for their pest control skills, domesticated ...

Robert Kunzig is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a former senior editor at National Geographic, Discover, and Scientific American, and the author of Mapping The Deep, Fixing Climate, ...

Yet there is effectively no federal agency with the power to mandate protections to keep more workers from getting sick. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has no authority to impose ...

Higher interest rates and lower returns from rented land are among indicators “suggesting land value reductions of around 3 percent in 2025,” said three agricultural economists at the farmdoc daily… ...