April Hemmes began farming soybeans in Iowa in the mid-1980s, just as the agricultural economy was in crisis and many farms ...

Increasingly, pesticides are being blamed for rising cancer rates across America’s agricultural communities. Hardin County, home to around 800 farms, has a pesticide use rate more than four times the ...

This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship. A majority of the top pesticide-using counties in the U.S. have cancer rates above the national average. For years, ...

Investigate Midwest’s editor-in-chief Ben Felder appeared Feb. 19 on Iowa Public Radio’s River to River with the launch of his latest investigation into pesticide use and cancer rates in the ...

Trump said he was going after the “worst of the worst,” but many of the people his administration is detaining and deporting have no criminal record. Agricultural employers are scrambling to find ...

An outcropping is seen along an ADA fishing trail at Lake Darling State Park in Brighton, Iowa, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014. photo by Jim Slosiarek, The Gazette When Kim Hagemann moved to Iowa in the ...

Over the last 30 years, the area has increasingly become home to large-scale confined animal feeding operations, commonly called CAFOs, which keep large numbers of animals in tight conditions.

Late 2025 marked the most severe three-month stretch in more than a decade for the gap between what agriculture producers pay to operate and what they receive in return, according to an analysis of ...

Note: This story was updated on Feb. 3, 2026 to reflect the latest results from the Ag Economy Barometer. After a year defined by tariff-driven trade tensions, farmers’ confidence in tariffs as a tool ...

Lots of folk who love the Marx Brothers think it was Groucho who famously said in “Duck Soup,” “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” But it wasn’t Groucho. In a delicious irony it was Chico ...