Luke Runyon
Reporter
Luke Runyon is Harvest Public Media's reporter based at KUNC in northern Colorado.
Stories by Luke Runyon
To Bring Bison Back To The Plains, Ranchers Say We Must Eat Them
Massive bison herds used to be a staple of the Great Plains. That is until we almost hunted them out of existence. Now, with a new designation as the United States’ national mammal, bison ranchers argue that to conserve the species we have to eat them. It’s an idea called “market-based conservation,” and it contends…
Dangerous Jobs, Cheap Meat | Fines For Meatpackers’ Safety Problems Are ‘Embarrassingly Low’
“Dangerous Jobs, Cheap Meat” is a three-part series from Harvest Public Media that focuses on the risks faced every day by the half-million people working in meatpacking factories to feed America’s desire for cheap meat. Look for Part II tomorrow on Flatland. On the worst day of Greta Horner’s life, she was dressed in a burlap robe,…
To Save the Monarch Butterfly, Many are Turning to the Humble Milkweed
Monarch butterflies are disappearing. Scientists agree that in the last 20 years, populations of the black and orange insect have been in precipitous decline. But there’s much less certainty on what’s causing them to vanish. As each new scientific paper on monarch decline is published, the image becomes slightly less opaque. So far, potential culprits…
Choice Cuts: Ready For a Cricket Taco?
This is the fifth and final part of Harvest Public Media’s week-long series Choice Cuts: Meat In America, examining how the meat industry is changing the U.S. food system and the American diet. The documentary on the subject, which aired Thursday on KCPT, will re-air Sunday at 9am and Monday at 10pm on KCPT. Beef, poultry and pork are staples of the American diet,…
My Farm Roots: Looking to the future
Jeff Siegfried knows just about anything you’d ever want to find out about a 50-acre corn field in northern Colorado. The 24-year-old easily rattles off the various gadgets he uses to measure soil moisture, plant health, air temperature. Standing underneath one of his research station’s at a Colorado State University experimental farm, Siegfried is decked…
Forget the robots, meat processing is still a human’s job
Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants throughout the country employ a lot of people. About a quarter of a million workers in the U.S. stun, kill and eviscerate the animals we eat. Most of those jobs are physically demanding and require few skills. So why haven’t we started using more robots to cut up our beef? The…
Monsanto, world’s largest seed company, sets off a corporate ‘feeding frenzy’
Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, is attempting to swallow up the chemical operations of Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of pesticides and other farm inputs. The proposed deal signals a change in focus for the agricultural giant, and could have ripple effects across farm country. By its own admission, Monsanto lags behind in chemistry…
Anxiety over changing farmworker housing rules
Many of the more than 3 million migrant farmworkers that plant and pick the fruits and vegetables we eat in the U.S. live on the farms they work for. But the rules that govern farmworker housing may be changing, worrying both farmers and migrant worker advocates. For decades, farmworker housing standards have been governed by…
Where do you get your meat from?
Food companies all over the world are paying close attention to the groundswell of support for food transparency: the “know where your food comes from” movement. JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, is beginning to take notice as well. But executives with JBS USA, the North American arm of its Brazilian parent company,…
Lamb producers are pinning hopes on growing Muslim and Latino markets
Once a regular dining option, a mix of cultural and economic factors pushed lamb off the American dinner table. To put the meat back on the menu, ranchers and retailers are being encouraged to reach out to a more diverse set of consumers, specifically American Muslims and Latinos.
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