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.
Graduate student Joshua Asiamah loads harvested stalks of hemp onto an all-terrain vehicle to be hauled away and studied at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., Oct. 14, 2024. Credit: Harshawn Ratanpal, KBIA
The Ag & Water Desk reporters are settling into their new roles and producing stories from around the Mississippi River watershed. Over the past week, we've published stories for radio, television and print.
Today, Harshawn Ratanpal, with KBIA in Columbia, Missouri, aired a story on efforts to revive a once-thriving hemp industry in the U.S. Hemp was an important crop in early U.S. history, used for clothing, ship sails and more. Then, following anti-drug campaigns in the 1930s, the U.S. effectively banned both hemp and marijuana. Hemp has been missing from farmers' fields for nearly a century.
Now it's back. Sort of.
The 2018 Farm Bill reversed a longstanding ban on industrial hemp, and today researchers are looking at hemp as a crop with possible climate benefits. Hemp can store 10 times more carbon in soil than cotton, for example, according to preliminary research by Lincoln University in Missouri. The school has received $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, which funds research on crops to develop management practices that benefit the climate.
Read or listen to the full story to see how researchers are finding new promise in a once-forgotten crop.
Last week we also released a story about how community members are stepping up to collect data for scientists. Ground and surface water are facing increasing threats from pollution and climate change, and scientists need help. Citizen science, which is done by non-professional scientists, can be part of the solution, according to a new report from the United Nations.
Read the full story by Flatland's Julie Freijat on how people are sampling water, cataloging bugs in streams as a measure of water quality, and even tagging migratory butterflies.
Reporter Avery Martinez, with KMOV, visited the New Madrid faultline, one of the most active earthquake areas east of the Rockies. Within the past two weeks, an earthquake near Tiptonville, Tennessee, could be felt in three states. An 1812 earthquake destroyed the town of New Madrid, Missouri, and thousands of minor quakes have been registered since the 1970s. Martinez reported on how emergency responders recently held training exercises to prepare for a potential earthquake. There’s only so much officials can do to prepare—because they know we can’t prevent earthquakes, all we can do is be ready.
Finally, Madeline Heim and Frank Vaisvilas of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on efforts to protect effigy mounds that are being eroded by the Mississippi River. The Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument, near Clayton, Iowa, contains one of the densest collections of ceremonial and burial mounds still existing in North America. But the river has significantly eroded the bank they're built on, eating away at some of the mounds at the water's edge. A multimillion-dollar bank stabilization project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could save them.
