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.
Louisville Courier Journal and Ag & Water Desk reporter Connor Giffin, a 2022 Report for America corps member, reports at a farm in Oldham County, Kentucky in fall 2023. Credit: Jeff Faughender, The Courier Journal
📢 Last call for our tiny survey about what you want to see in this newsletter!
Louisville Courier Journal and Ag & Water Desk reporter Connor Giffin, a 2022 Report for America corps member, reports at a farm in Oldham County, Kentucky in fall 2023. Credit: Jeff Faughender, The Courier Journal
All of our journalism is powered by corps members with Report for America, a national journalism service program. RFA places early-career reporters in local newsrooms around the country — including most of the staff of the Ag & Water Desk.
We worked with Report for America to select 10 newsrooms and corps members as our founding cohort of journalists in 2022. Now, we’re welcoming 11 new reporters and newsrooms to the project — expanding our footprint to every mainstem Mississippi River state and beyond, new media formats and more diverse audiences.
“We’re growing, and now we’ll be able to reach new communities that haven’t had this kind of local environmental reporting,” said Sara Shipley Hiles, the Ag & Water Desk’s executive director of the Desk and a faculty member at the Missouri School of Journalism, our home base. “We hope to show people how environmental issues connect us, even across state lines.”
The first members of our incoming reporter group were announced last week. Read on to meet them, and stay tuned for their stories when they start work in July.
Thanks for reading,
Annie Ropeik Ag & Water Desk assistant director
PS — Wondering why it’s been quiet on the Ag & Water Desk story front lately? Both our main team and our student journalists are in the home stretch reporting and editing a couple of big series. Look for those projects and more out in the coming weeks!
Dufalla previously interned at PublicSource, an investigative nonprofit newsroom in his hometown of Pittsburgh. There, he covered housing and economic development in the city and its surrounding boroughs. A summer before, he interned at the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper, where he covered small business in southern Maine. He attended Bowdoin College and wrote for the school’s student-run weekly newspaper, The Bowdoin Orient.
Freijat previously served as a data reporter for Kansas City PBS through the Dow Jones News Fund. She also held two internships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and served in multiple leadership roles at the campus paper of Kansas State University, where she graduated with a bachelor's in journalism and minor in biology in 2022. Freijat received her master’s in journalism in 2024 from the University of Missouri, where she worked as a research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors and as a student staffer at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Hurtado is an award-winning journalist who contributed regularly to Cicero Independiente. Her journalism career includes reporting for WBEZ Chicago, City Bureau, WTTW Chicago, Borderless Magazine and Telemundo Chicago. Her work in 2022 covering Pilsen’s art history for WBEZ’s Curious City earned her a regional Edward Murrow award and a Peter Lisagor award nomination. Hurtado’s collaborative investigations into traffic stop disparities with Chicago Reporter alumni and WBEZ have contributed to state-level efforts to address racial disparities.
Before joining the MFP, Ireland completed a fellowship at The Futuro Media Group in New York City, taking on projects related to public health, climate change and housing insecurity. Working with Futuro’s investigative unit, he helped uncover significant disparities in mortgage outcomes between white and Latino homebuyers in New Jersey. Ireland holds a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and a master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School. He’s a native Spanish speaker and proud Mexican American.
Plunk earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida, where she worked as editor-in-chief of Atrium magazine, a narrative nonfiction outlet on campus. She also worked as an environmental communications intern for the Thompson Earth Systems Institute, where she wrote feature stories and produced social media content on environmental topics relevant to Floridians, and as a climate journalist fellow at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Plunk’s favorite class in college was environmental journalism, where she learned to connect her passion for the natural world with her studies in reporting. When she isn’t working, she loves making art from upcycled materials.
As part of his graduate studies at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Powell previously worked as a reporter on Capitol Hill focused on politics and foreign affairs. At Medill, Phillip is taking part in large investigative projects with ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, along with building multimedia skills in podcasting, photography, and video journalism. He holds his bachelor’s degree in political science from Hendrix College, where he was a staff writer for The Profile and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning Aonian Literary Magazine. He graduates from Northwestern in June with a Master of Science in Journalism.
Ratanpal previously covered money in politics at OpenSecrets, tracking campaign finance and lobbying data. While attending the Missouri School of Journalism, he covered local government, homelessness and the state legislature for KBIA and the Columbia Missourian and was the news director of the campus student-run radio station KCOU. He holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and economics. His first real-world gig was interning for his hometown newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune. He started his career in the 7th grade, writing for his school paper, the PawPrints. In his free time, Ratanpal makes music, lifts weights and climbs rocks.
More staffing updates
Keely Brewer at Cooper’s Landing in Missouri during the Ag & Water Desk’s fall 2022 conference.
We’re saying goodbye to one of our 2022 corps members this week — Keely Brewer, our reporter with The Daily Memphian. She’s heading to New York City.
