Harvest Public Media

A growing legal movement to grant natural entities like rivers and forests legal rights is gaining traction in the U.S., and environmentalists are now setting their sights on the Mississippi River.

The United Nations has declared 2023 the International Year of Millets — a type of small grain mostly grown in parts of Asia and Africa. The highly resilient and cost-friendly grains could make them the next crop for U.S. farmers in the midst of climate change.

Iowa is the latest state to legalize the sale of raw milk, which comes directly from cows without any pasteurization. While nearly every Midwestern state allows such sales, some health experts caution there are health risks to drinking it.

Auctions — a marketplace for knick knacks, farm land and everything in between — are often also gathering events for rural communities. That’s changing as more auctions go online.

Three companies are proposing pipelines across the Midwest that would carry carbon dioxide captured from ethanol plants to underground sequestration sites. The plan is to inject the CO2 deep into rock formations under Illinois and North Dakota, but some landowners are pushing back.

Every five years, Congress has to renew the farm bill — a gigantic piece of legislation that supports and protects food production, natural resources and provides food benefits to low-income families.

Across the Midwest, some city codes threaten people with fines for having milkweed on their property. But experts say many places have dropped those rules to support monarchs with urban and suburban butterfly gardens.

A new report from the Environmental Working Group found targeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture's conservation funding to the Mississippi River region would have huge benefits to water quality and the climate.

Three companies want to capture carbon dioxide from Midwestern ethanol plants, transport it by pipeline and store it underground. Many in the ethanol industry claim it’s essential to the industry’s survival. Environmentalists and even farmers argue the pipelines are a boon for the industry — not a real solution for climate change.

States in the Midwest and South have already seen many deadly tornadoes so far this year. These parts of the country are also where the number of severe events are steadily increasing.