After a four-year hiatus, the Polk County Master Gardeners’ Garden Tour is back, highlighting 11 exceptional gardeners and garden enthusiasts across the county, including Urbandale, Clive, Des Moines and Ankeny. The tour is part of Iowa State University Extension and […]
As someone who grew up in semi-tropical south Louisiana, I didn’t think Iowa had anything to teach me about humidity. I was wrong. Iowa, of course, is the most corn-centric of the states. Last year, cornfields made up more than […]
Half of Iowa’s grocery stores closed in the last quarter of the 20th century, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. Today, roughly 40 percent of Iowans live a half mile or more from the nearest source of fresh […]
My pandemic project ended up being more unconventional than most. (I tried sourdough at the beginning, but forgot the starter in the fridge until last week.) As an anti-factory-farming activist, I found myself drawn to alternative food sources. I began […]
In the popular imagination, the small-town Midwest exists in a state of fixed, unchanging idyll, in which people who have always lived there and always will pass on to their children the rural values and traditions they themselves inherited. For […]
You don’t have to give up your favorite fleshy entrees in order to eat ethically — but it won’t be as easy as swinging by Walmart for a $6 pound of ground beef, either. Cutting out the middlemen in the […]
The War on Meat (2021 edition) may just be a Republican talking point, but 90 years ago, National Guard troops armed with literal rifles and bayonets were deployed against cattle farmers in eastern Iowa in what became known as the […]
By Zoe Pharo and Paul Brennan For most Americans, the 2021 War on Meat was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in conservative culture-war politics, the kind typically sparked by a red Starbucks cup or the marketing of a slightly more gender-neutral Barbie […]
On Monday, a federal judge in Cedar Rapids dismissed a lawsuit from Iowa pork producers seeking to overturn a law in California that prohibits the sale of “the meat of a breeding pig, or the immediate offspring of a breeding […]
The state government’s various attempts over the last nine years to shield industrial animal farms with an ag gag law were spotlighted in court Tuesday. The injunction preventing the first ag gag law, signed into law by Gov. Terry Branstad […]
For five years, Sarah Prineas has been getting up before dawn and heading to the Beckwith Boathouse at the University of Iowa to meet other members of Hawkeye Community Rowing for practice. The rowing team practices four to five times a week on the Iowa River.
“It’s always beautiful in the morning,” Prineas said. “The river is calm, and the sun is coming up. On the banks of the river we see deer, all kinds of waterfowl and eagles. It’s really very peaceful and beautiful.” […]
Es de noche y camino por el campo de Cathy y Ralph. Algo de luna se refleja en los silos, en las escaleras que suben a los techos, en el camión que lleva al maíz cuando ya está listo para […]
