Farm & Field
Why the Midwest is recruiting California dairies
As drought, feed costs, and urban development wear on West Coast milk producers, states like Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa are pitching themselves as a dairy heaven. Even in California, the nation’s No. 1 dairy state, many dairy farmers are listening.
Group seeks to get rid of Kansas sales tax on food
Led by KC Healthy Kids, a nonprofit organization supported in part by the Kansas Health Foundation, a coalition is being formed to guide a legislative effort to exempt food from the state sales tax.
Greener pastures of the Midwest attract California dairies
California’s branded as the state with happy cows, but increasingly, not necessarily happy dairy owners. Some are some selling their cattle and heading to the Midwest.
Women have always been farmers, now they’re being counted
When farmer Sondra Pierce had her first child, she decided to forgo daycare. “Soon as I had my son, because I had my son very early, I would put his car seat in the tractor and he would ride with me,” Pierce says. During harvest on her sugar beet farm in rural Boulder County, Colo.,…
Crop dusting pilots navigate dangerous airspace
Mike Lee steers his plane over the Missouri-Arkansas state line, checking out a checkerboard of green and brown fields of rice, cotton, corn and soybeans. Lee is the owner of Earl’s Flying Service, a crop dusting business in Steele, Mo., and he’s scouting some farm fields that his pilots will treat later in the day….