Desk Stories by the Numbers

We share some of our story statistics from the past year.

A Desk graphic says LOCAL AND COLLABORATIVE STORIES
A Desk graphic says LOCAL AND COLLABORATIVE STORIES
We're looking back at our story counts this year and since the Desk launched in 2022. (Graphics: Grace Noble/Ag & Water Desk)

Here at the Ag & Water Desk, our fiscal year starts in July. This means our staff spent the last few weeks crunching numbers and compiling reports for our generous funders that support this important work across the Basin.

This week, we're excited to share some of those numbers with you.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, the Ag & Water Desk covers the nation’s largest watershed as an interconnected ecosystem, with journalists stationed at 15 local news outlets and counting. These reporters and other contributors work with our staff to produce multimedia coverage of agriculture, water, climate, energy, and other topics, which is shared with newsrooms to republish for free. (Newsrooms: sign up for that list here.)

From July 2024 to July 2025, our journalists produced more than 1,141 local stories and approximately 72 collaborative stories and projects on regional environmental topics.

This brings the Ag & Water Desk’s total body of work since we started publishing in 2022 to more than 2,200 local stories and 190 collaborative pieces.

We're incredibly proud to provide this nuanced, fact-based environmental reporting to communities that would otherwise go without.

A Desk graphic says 72 COLLABORATIVE STORIES THIS YEAR AND 190 COLLABORATIVE PIECES TO DATE

Collaborative Desk stories done in conjuction with our staff are data-driven, investigative, or regional in nature. Here are just a few examples of our work in the past year. You can explore our full backlog of stories here.

Tall grasses blow in the wind by a river
A man in a hat and jeans walks beside a field of crops
A garage is flooded with brown water. A stop sign is nearly covered in water

Decades after it disappeared, wild rice is booming again on the upper Mississippi River 
By Madeline Heim

As climate threats to agriculture mount, could the Mississippi River delta be the next California?
By Cassandra Stephenson, Illan Ireland and Phillip Powell

Insurance reform worsens affordability in flood-prone Louisiana 
By Elise Plunk

Desk reporters also cover their local communities, covering everything from farmers to flooding. This is important, as study after study shows that people tend to trust local media outlets more than national ones.

A Desk graphic says 1141 LOCAL STORIES THIS YEAR

Here are a few local stories of note:

A graphic of homes plugged into a grid

Why are utility companies monopolies?
By Harshawn Ratanpal, Jana Rose Schleis

A woman stands in a library filled with books

Longtime environmental educators prep Illinois teachers for new climate education requirement
By Jess Savage

A family walks alongside a row of lavendar growing

Sweet-smelling lavender farm building community
By Estefanía Pinto Ruiz

We're thankful to be able to work on a project that has the massive scale of the Ag & Water Desk, especially in a time of shrinking editorial budgets and growing news deserts.

If you can support this reporting, please donate to the project here. Thanks for joining us on this journey. More next week from across the Basin.

Sincerely,

Michael Crowe
Operations Manager,
Ag & Water Desk

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