A recent report from Argus Media decried the declining profitability of organic feed crops. The report sounded the alarm that the decline could push organic farmers to exit back to conventional.

Since January 2022, beleaguered producers’ number one question has been when this latest outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI or H5N1) will end. More than 2 years in, we ask whether that’s still the right question, or whether H5N1 has become endemic to North America. 

Amidst a record-breaking heatwave last month, Alison and I boarded an early morning Amtrak train due south. The destination? Washington, D.C. for the 2024 Climate Crossroads Summit at the National Academy of Sciences.

The path to a green career isn’t always clear cut. Meet Spencer, Grow Well's newest analyst, who's taken a unique journey from supply chain management to environmental advocacy. His story is one of passion, adaptability, and a commitment to making a difference in the face of climate change.

Food and agriculture giants are vocal about their climate change ambitions. However, the reality of their commitments and the impact on their emissions remains unclear.

This month, I decided to publish my recommendations publicly so that everyone can read them. Enjoy!

One could say the food system is ripe with opportunity. 

While climate change is – or should be – at the forefront of our minds, it’s easy to think that the food system is complex, full of challenges, and rife with social inequities. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. But those of us who work in it are also presented with opportunities for positive transformation every day. 

Every few weeks, I receive a request via email or LinkedIn, or sometimes a referral that could broadly be classified as, “Help! How do you balance professional work and parenting work at the same time?” I typically use gender neutral language intentionally when discussing parenting, but truth be told, 100% of these requests have come from women.

“How did you get to where you are today?”

I’m often asked this question, though the asker isn’t always ready for the long and winding road that brought me to opening my own firm. Sometimes, it’s a pleasant question that opens up a conversation. And sometimes, the asker is a young person who dreams of starting their own niche business, or a woman in science who is searching for a roadmap that might resemble the one she’s charting.

Just four states have heat rules that protect farm workers. Though the Department of Labor is working towards creating some, an effort to create some regs for farm and construction workers in Miami-Dade county made some noise and fizzled out because commissioners worried the rules could “potentially kill industry.”

The latest food insecurity in the United States are the worst they’ve been since the Great Recession and are poised to get much worse as politicians push forward SNAP and WIC rollbacks.

If you, like me, enjoyed some tofu with rice noodles from time to time, I’ll go ahead and spoil things for you: You and all the tofu eaters out there were not the culprit. Neither were all the preschoolers eating their Dora the Explorer-branded edamame snack packs.