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 25 explanatory or investigative reports on a range of topics published with 13 outlets, including national geographic, the guardian, smithsonian magazine, the nation, the atlantic, and others. During the fiscal year, hot farm, fern's first podcast, won the institute for nonprofit news 2022 insight award for explanatory journalism. We also continued to cover the biggest stories on the Food and agriculture beat, which include climate change and biodiversity loss, labor issues, and equity more generally. We've reported on, among other things, the debate over carbon-capture and sequestration and what it means for Iowa farmers, a decades-long fight to secure clean drinking water supplies by a California town founded by black americans, the concerning drop in size of pacific salmon and what that might mean for the pacific northwest ecosystem; lab-grown meat's serious pr problem, the unlikely alliance behind the work to save wild rice, the links between water scarcity, extreme weather, and Food insecurity, concerns over the science behind one of agriculture's key climate solutions, an investigation into child worker labor violations in the Food industry, a look at the explosive rise of seaweed aquaculture, and an expos into a police killing at a meatpacking plant in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the gastropod podcast project produced 21 new episodes total and saw an increase in average downloads per episode within the first 6 weeks of release.

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.