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 ...

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 ...

Today, I would like to call attention to two recent FERN works with new media partners. In “ How Trump’s deportation plan could actually increase migrant labor,” co-published with Politico Magazine, ...

In May of 2024, the owners of Mary Mahoney’s, an institution in Biloxi, Mississippi, pleaded guilty to fraudulently selling more than 29 tons of fish between December 2013 and November 2019, claiming ...

“Rising temperatures in the Mediterranean ha[ve] rendered olive oil scarcer than it had been in recent memory,” writes Lauren Markham, and as prices have risen, so have thefts. “Thieves have … hit ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you stop at a roadside restaurant anywhere between North Dakota and Oklahoma, you might not immediately get a sense of culinary diversity. Many menus in rural and small-town middle America consist ...