A support group and a lab in the St. Louis area provide resources for people with the allergy to mammal products — and evidence that its effects can be reversed.
The sun rises over a dock on Chesapeake Bay in Havre de Grace, Maryland, April 4, 2024. Credit: Bennet Goldstein, Wisconsin Watch for the Ag & Water Desk
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The sun rises over a dock on Chesapeake Bay in Havre de Grace, Maryland, April 4, 2024. Credit: Bennet Goldstein, Wisconsin Watch for the Ag & Water Desk
Our whole team is hard at work finalizing a big series — in the works practically since the Desk’s inception — about agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River basin.
A visit to Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay during the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Philadelphia earlier this month will help shape this project.
“I think it’s really easy and natural for reporters to get wrapped up in the local issues around them. So having the chance to see another watershed in the Chesapeake was very intriguing to me,” said Desk reporter Eric Schmid of St. Louis Public Radio. “They experience some of the same fundamental challenges that we do in the Mississippi River Basin, but they look and feel different for so many reasons: geography, industry (like what is grown or farmed there), politics, regulation and so many others.
Eric said it was hard to relate the Mississippi and Chesapeake watersheds in the moment as he drove through the landscape of rural Maryland and Pennsylvania.
“But this trip proved invaluable once I returned and I had interviews with farmers in Illinois on issues of nutrient runoff,” he said. “My experience on the tour helped me ask better questions because I had seen what other governments, nonprofits, farmers, industry and others were doing to try and address the nutrient issue.”
Plus, he said, the tour was a chance to practice his on-record questions ahead of time.
We’re thrilled to provide these field training opportunities for our journalists as part of our partnership with SEJ. And as our resident Marylander, I’m personally extra excited to see what the team learned about the beautiful Chesapeake in our upcoming runoff project. Look for the first of those stories in early June.
Thanks for reading (and happy Earth Week!),
Annie Ropeik Ag & Water Desk assistant director
Coming soon: our new reporter cohort
Report for America will announce its 2024 corps members this week, including 11 journalists who will join the Ag & Water Desk team from local newsrooms around the basin!
Read up on our incoming newsrooms here (and on this map), and stay tuned to our website and social media to meet our new reporters. We’ll introduce them in this newsletter next week.
This story from our Missouri School of Journalism student partners and Ag & Water Desk data journalist Jared Whalen is part of an upcoming series on sludge applied to farmland as fertilizer:
Increasing public knowledge on watersheds is the foundational step to good watershed reporting, said Madeline Heim, an environmental reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [and Ag & Water Desk]. Many Wisconsinites are unaware that Wisconsin is part of both the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin.
“If we can bring people in on the most basic level and get them to understand the basin, then we can keep building on that knowledge to unlock interest and further learning,” Heim said. Read more at Great Lakes Echo.
