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.
Welcome back to the Ag & Water Desk’s bi-weekly newsletter. We hope you had a restful end to 2023 and a good start to the new year. Our reporters are hard at work covering a freeze blanketing much of the basin, the kickoff of state legislative sessions and more.
Our expert journalist mentor Chris Clayton of DTN/The Progressive farmer led a roundtable for our reporters this week on the soon-to-be-released Census of Agriculture, and we’re starting to dig in on new collaborative reporting projects for 2024.
We’re already gearing up for the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference, this April in Philadelphia. As part of our partnership with SEJ, the Ag & Water Desk will host a workshop for journalists about covering policy and governance at a watershed scale. The conference is one of the few times a year that our team gets together in person! We hope you’ll join us, or consider becoming a sponsor or exhibitor.
A reminder that the application deadline for our next cohort of Report for America journalists is coming up at the end of the month. We have 11 openings for new Ag & Water Desk reporters in newsrooms across the basin. Please spread the word to any early-career journalists you know who might want to join our close-knit collaborative. We can’t wait to start sharing our new teammates’ work with you later this year.
Lastly, we invite you to forward this newsletter to anyone else in your life who might want to keep up with environmental news from the nation’s largest watershed. Don’t forget that news outlets can run our stories for free — editors can sign up here. And as always, you can reply to this email or reach us at info@agwaterdesk.org to share your story ideas.
Thanks for reading,
Annie Ropeik
Ag & Water Desk Assistant Director
Our latest stories
The sun rises over the upper Mississippi River north of the Quad Cities on Sept. 18, 2023. Aerial support provided by LightHawk. Credit: Nick Rohlman, The Gazette
Water quality is generally improving, but road salt and lead are on the rise as problems on the river above St. Louis, finds a new report from the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association.
By Madeline Heim, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — Jan. 9, 2024
ICYMI: Our story on river towns looking to each other for nature-based solutions to climate threats, by Eric Schmid of St. Louis Public Radio, ran in Grist last week.
And check out these recent river explainers from Madeline Heim:
Note: Some stories may be paywalled. If you can, we encourage you to support our partners and reporters and your local news outlets with a subscription or donation.
Brittney Miller of The Gazette has a two-part series on the legacy and future of Iowa’s decade-old law for reducing the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff that fuels the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone.”
Louisiana climatologist:
Desk senior advisor Mark Schleifstein reported that Barry Keim’s ouster at Louisiana State University may have stemmed from a dispute with farm interests over drought classification.
A provision tucked into a federal spending bill late last year effectively blocks big livestock farms from reporting how much of this potent greenhouse gas their operations emit, expert journalist Georgina Gustin reports for Inside Climate News.
Carbon storage:
Louisiana will now oversee where companies can inject carbon dioxide underground, paving the way for a potential boom in projects as the state’s heavy industry looks to ease its climate impacts — another story from Halle Parker of WWNO.
Hawk protections:
A Kentucky lawmaker is seeking to remove penalties for the killing or capture of two protected species of hawks, drawing the ire of conservation groups. Our Connor Giffin reports for the Louisville Courier Journal.
Road salt art:
An artist scooped up buckets of road salt from a parking lot in Minneapolis and combined it with Mississippi River water to tell a powerful story, writes Madeline Heim for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
