Tagged: Harvest Public Media

Just as the local foods movement is growing legs in the Midwest, a key piece of infrastructure is struggling. 

Many small poultry processing plants have closed, in large part because of  challenges finding laborers and making a profit. Without the plants, small farmers say they won't be able to provide meat to local grocery stores and farmers markets.

In Iowa, poultry growers this year got an unexpected, and unwelcome, surprise right during poultry harvest time -- one of Iowa's three state-inspected poultry plants shut down.  

From Harvest Public Media: With more families depending on the National School Lunch Program to feed their children, school districts are gearing up to implement new nutrition guidelines being handed down by the federal government by early next year.

The dirt’s far from settled at the construction site of the new home for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility— or NBAF — in Manhattan, Kan.

Kansas City, MO – The vast majority of women-run farms are smaller, and focus on niche markets, like grass-fed livestock. Together, Helen Gunderson and Betsy Dahl are breaking into a typical male territory and taking it in their own direction.

Listen to the story at Harvest Public Media

Kansas City, MO –

Across the Midwest, the landscape of farming is subtly changing hands. As the population ages, one group of farmland owners is growing: widows. In Iowa, women over 65 now own more than a one-quarter of the farmland.

While women have long been a part of farm life, women landowners frequently face unique social and cultural challenges. Advocates say that they haven't always been respected as farm decision makers and leaders. Slowly this is changing.

By Tim Lloyd/Harvest Public Media

Kansas City, MO –

You've probably heard of Web 2.0, but what about Ag 2.0? It's shorthand for the infusion of technology into every facet of the agriculture industry.

Now a fresh crop of entrepreneurs is busy developing technologies that could change the face of farming.

Harvest Public Media's Tim Lloyd profiles one local company that's cultivated a new way for farmers to sell what they grow.

Got your interest piqued?

By Rick Frederickson/Harvest Public Media

Des Moines, IA –

(Photo by slolee / Flickr Creative Commons License)

Listen to the story

Marquette wine may be the most highly anticipated new product to ever hit Iowa's commercial wine industry.

And it's time has arrived.