farming

KBIA’s The Next Harvest podcast tells the stories of farmers in the Midwest using regenerative agriculture practices and high-tech tools to make their farms sustainable -- including agrivoltaics, drones, precision agriculture, and cover crops.

For the past four years, a federal program has given Missouri farmers and hungry families a boost by putting locally grown, fresh food on their tables. But the recently canceled Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement won't provide that help this year.

The lesser prairie chicken was once a common sight in the southern Great Plains, but its numbers are dwindling. Even so, it lost federal protections earlier this year for a second time. Now states and landowners are overseeing conservation efforts

Conservation methods can help rejuvenate farmland, but the startup cost and uncertain results mean a risk many farmers still aren't willing to take. The University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture is trying to research how to improve the practice.

The U.S. agricultural industry depends on undocumented immigrants, but President Trump’s immigration crackdown is further depleting an already tight workforce. The labor crisis may be setting the stage for big changes to a federal program that allows foreign workers into the country legally.

Temperatures remained into the 80s well in the fall this year in parts of the Midwest. Agrivoltaics offers a respite to extreme heat and land access for new farmers.

Contractors say they have enough local labor to detassel Nebraska’s seed corn but they’re losing work to migrant workers on H-2A visas. A 2024 law attempted to increase transparency in detasseling.

Some Midwestern soybean farmers are selling their beans to be crushed and turned into soybean meal and oil. But economists say domestic processing won’t be enough to offset the drop in Chinese demand.

Supply is expected to surpass traditional grain storage capacity in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. Some elevators, including historic Ely's in Nebraska, are adding temporary storage.

Some family farms in Missouri have added corn mazes to their fields during the fall to supplement their income.

El cierre del Gobierno impide la administración de los subsidios agrícolas por parte del Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos, (USDA) lo cual amenaza con un aumento de los juicios hipotecarios de las granjas. También retrasa la ayuda financiera que el presidente Trump había prometido a los agricultores afectados por los aranceles.

Ranchers, lawmakers and farmers’ unions are sounding the alarm over a Trump administration plan to increase beef imports from Argentina.