In The Field

When it rains on Joe Rothermel’s central Illinois farm, most of the water drains into the nearby East Branch Embarras River. There, it begins a journey south through the Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. As it flows through more and more farmland, fertilizer runoff -- which once nourished crops -- compounds the water’s nutrient load, resulting in a dead zone off the coast of Texas and Louisiana. 

When countries like China buy soybeans and grain, that journey might start in a port in the land-locked state of Oklahoma. 

Farmers in states like Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Colorado rely on a 445-mile water highway called the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System to ship their crops like soybeans and grain across the world. 

Farmers along the Missouri River won a mass action federal lawsuit last December against the Army Corps of Engineers for land damages they say are traceable to the agency’s management of the river. 

John Boyd Jr. believes Black farmers are going extinct. As the president of the National Black Farmers Association and a farmer in Virginia, he’s been advocating for nearly 30 years for government action to relieve Black farmers of debt.

“When animals are facing extinction, Congress puts laws in place until their numbers come back, such as the brown bear and the black bear and rockfish and the bald eagle, all of these things Congress can act swiftly on,” Boyd says. “But here we are saying the same thing for the past 30 some odd years, and Congress has been slow to act.”

Using electronic tags to track livestock is widespread in Europe. Proponents say it helps prevent and contain food-borne illnesses, but the idea is finding a mixed and often chilly reception in the United States.

Radio frequency identification, or RFID tags, can be put on an animal’s ear similar to the metal id clips currently used to identify animals and track them for inventory and health purposes.

But the RFID chips send out a signal, which is captured by a reader that uploads information into a database. They are in common use in industries ranging from logistics to amusement parks. 

On a recent Saturday, white vans shuttled small groups of migrant farmworkers from the southern Illinois orchard where they work to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. The workers had arrived days earlier from Mexico for the start of the tilling season.