Food and Environment Reporting Network

The Food & Environment Reporting Network continues to demonstrate an ability to deliver smart, powerful journalism that helps define, and often leads, the media coverage of its areas of focus. During the fiscal year, we produced 24 explanatory or investigative reports and 2 multi-story series on a range of topics published with 16 outlets, including the Washington post, bloomberg businessweek, grist, npr's morning edition, mother jones, and others. One of our main initiatives during the year represented a first for fern. We co-published a full magazine, having overseen the special Food issue of switchyard, a biannual literary publication from the university of tulsa. Featured in this issue was an essay by top chef co-host tom colicchio on Food policy; theodore ross's in-depth interview with sean sherman, chef and co-owner of owamni restaurant in minneapolis, whose cookbook the sioux chef's indigenous kitchen won a james beard award in 2018; an investigative feature by dan charles about pesticides and the threat to pollinators, which will also be featured in an episode of our upcoming podcast series; and two deeply personal narratives on the social and political issues bound up in Food by siddartha deb and jori lewis. Paired with the issue was a live event in tulsa which featured several of the article authors. Finally, switchyard released three podcast episodes based on the pieces, which were co-released on fern's new podcast distribution platform reap/sow: dispatches from the frontlines of farming, Food & the Environment. Another notable effort during the past year has been development and production for fern's second limited-series podcast. Entitled buzzkill, it explores the pollinator crisis. While the crisis facing bees is well known, the world of pollinators is far more complex than domesticated honey bees. Native bees, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats, and other small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians populate a nearly invisible ecosystem that allows flowering plantsfood crops and wild plants aliketo produce seeds and fruits. Buzzkill will explore this rich and deep world, examining critical issues such as the loss of habitat and entire ecosystems, which have larger ramifications than the decline of a single species. We have raised over $160,000 for the project, representing about three-quarters of the total budget required for completion. We have hired an executive producer, adizah eghan, formerly of vice media and the new york times, to oversee the production and began Reporting and recording. We expect to release the podcast in early 2025.to support the new series, we also revamped our existing podcast feed, which we had created for the hot farm series. We changed the name to "reap/sow: dispatches from the front lines of Food, farming, and the Environment, and have been releasing episodes monthly featuring selections from our audio archive as well as original podcast episodes in partnership with kqed in California and wwno in new orleans. We also launched reap/sow video on youtube, a q&a featuring each episode's host, as a complement to the audio piece. We expect reap/sow to help us maintain the audience we built with hot farm and bring it forward to buzzkill and beyond. We view it as fern's dedicated podcast channel and the home for all our audio work, whether limited series, one-off podcast episodes, radio reports, and other items.fern moved strongly into a new format this year: what we call special story packages. This feature allows us to cover a complicated subject from a range of angles and perspectives in shorter pieces with different writers. The first was published with mother jones on the federal farm bill. Published in early 2024, this was a multi-story digital feature looking at the process of passing the farm bill in an era of extreme political dysfunction. The second was a similarly structured series on Food waste with inverse, a digital culture and science news site from the bustle media group.two of the projects we released in 2023 were finalists for national magazine awards, the "oscars" of magazine awards. Alone on the range by fern staff reporter teresa cotsirilos is a finalist in the public interest Reporting category and our switchyard Food issue collaboration is a finalist for single-topic issue. These are our first national magazine award nominations and represent a recognition by our peers that fern's work is at the highest level of journalist achievement.a final project of significance that developed over the course of the year was a collaboration with mother jones on a special story package on the federal farm bill. Published in early 2024, this is a multi-story digital feature looking at the process of passing the farm bill in an era of extreme political dysfunction. Another first for fern, this series will include staff writers from fern and mother jones and subject experts on the farm bill from outside our organizations. The Reporting will be more argument driven than our typical longform narrative style, similar to (and partly inspired by) our recent Reporting on the problematic nature of crop insurance in the age of climate change in the new republic. Reporting on the farm bill is hard. Getting lost in the weeds is easy, as is soaring so high above the details that you can't discern the human consequences. Fern's coverage with mother jones will thread the needle between those two outcomes, looking at the issues that are actually going to get addressed, the ones that won't, and why.

We produced dozens of original reported pieces for our fern's ag insider policy news service. Topics that received extensive coverage this year, included climate policy, California water issues, and Food access policy. We now have more than 400 individual and corporate subscribers and a growing number of academic institutional subscribers, including nyu, harvard law school, university of California, berkeley, yale, and the university of Pennsylvania, to our subscription-only service. In addition, nearly 2,200 people receive the free newsletter version every weekday.