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 ...

The Food & Environment Reporting Network is the first independent, non-profit news organization that produces in-depth and investigative journalism in the critically under-reported areas of food, ...

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 ...

On a mid-August Sunday in that bleak pandemic summer of 2020, the air near central California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park felt muggy, almost tropical. Weird, thought naturalist Christian Schwarz, ...

If you avoid meat to cut down on animal cruelty, carbon emissions or both, your options are a lot better than they were a decade ago, which is to say they’re … fine. For people who can afford to pay a ...

In November, when a string of catastrophic storms hit the Pacific Northwest, the Nooksack River flooded, submerging farming communities in both the U.S. and Canada. Cows were swept away, and farmers ...

When University of Minnesota researcher Crystal Ng won a grant to study wild rice in Ojibwe waters, tribal members reacted to her with anger. Ng spent a year listening to their concerns and now works ...

Two of the largest palm oil plantations in Peru are located on the west side of the Ucayali River, which flows from the Andes to the Amazon. From above, the surrounding landscape looks like stirred ...

From paying workers a living wage to diversifying the supply chain, the coronavirus crisis has exposed fundamental problems with how food is produced and distributed in this country. We asked a group ...

The Salton Sea has shrunk dramatically over the last few decades, exposing miles of lake bed — and the toxic chemicals trapped there — that is sometimes stirred up as dust by the wind. Public-health ...