Harvest Public Media

A daily digest of headlines from KCUR.
Event provides Free Dental Care To 2,100 People
Ron Paul’s Visits Kansas City
Farmers Play The Commodities Market with Grain Bins

Pick up your favorite packaged food and read the ingredient list. If you stumbled over any of the words or a color jumped out at you, you might be looking at what’s known as a food additive.

Drive by a field that’s ready for biomass harvest and you’ll think you’re too late. The grain is gone and it’s just broken stalks and leaves everywhere.

Recruiting doctors to small towns is a chronic problem. Most places try to lure a physician by rolling out the red carpet with a big salary, a home on a golf course or other cushy perks.

The U.S. Labor Department on Wednesday backed off a controversial change to child labor laws after an outcry from farm country, softening its stance on barring kids from working certain jobs on family farms.

Throwing food scraps to hogs and other farm animals is an age-old practice. As food production has become more industrialized, food factories have found ways to continue to recycle massive amounts of would-be food waste.

A committee of the National Research Council visited Kansas State University Friday to get a feel for safety concerns for a giant biosafety lab planned for the Manhattan, Kan., campus.

Dudley Butler is quitting his job tomorrow. Never heard of him? He's President Obama's appointee to run the division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that governs antitrust issues in the meat industry. He was part of a cadre of high-level bureaucrats charged to expose and fight agribusiness monopolies. In fact, he was the last of that group.

Butler set out to change the cattle industry. But he ran into many hurdles, not least of which was fierce opposition from meatpackers, who exert a lot of influence in Washington, D.C.

A new report says NBAF -- the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility -- could create 1300 jobs during the construction phase alone.

It’s been three years since the Department of Homeland Security chose Kansas as the site of its National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, or NBAF, but there’s a growing sense that the project has a precarious future.