Dan Charles

Selling seeds and pesticides used to be a sleepy, slow-moving business. That was, until about 20 years ago, when the chemical company Monsanto introduced genetically modified crops and started buying up seed companies. Ever since, companies in this industry have been maneuvering like hungry fish in a pond, occasionally dining ...

Farmers and public health advocates have been arguing for many years now about the use of antibiotics on farm animals, yet that argument takes place in a fog of uncertainty, because a lot of information simply isn't available.

The main source of information about antibiotic use on farms, an ...

Chipotle is trumpeting its renunciation of ingredients derived from genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. The company says that using GMOs — mainly corn in its tortillas and soybean oil for cooking — "doesn't align" with its vision of "food with integrity." According to Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold, it ...

Antibiotic use is falling out of fashion in the poultry industry. Tyson Foods, the biggest poultry producer in the U.S., says it will stop feeding its birds human-use antibiotics in two years.

A flu strain deadly to chickens and turkeys is striking farms in the West and Midwest. This week, it hit an Iowa facility with millions of egg-laying hens. No one knows how it's entering houses.

What's a fair way to divide up California's scarce water? The current system relies heavily on history: Some farmers will get water, others won't, based simply on when their land was first irrigated.

California is parched. Wells are running dry. Vegetable fields have been left fallow and lawns are dying. There must be some villain behind all this, right?

Of course there is. In fact, have your pick. As a public service, The Salt is bringing you several of the leading candidates. They ...

A planet that is warming at extraordinary speed may require extraordinary new food crops. The latest great agricultural hope is beans that can thrive in temperatures that cripple most conventional beans. They're now growing in test plots of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, in Colombia.

Many ...

An international committee of cancer experts shocked the agribusiness world a few days ago when it announced that two widely used pesticides are "probably carcinogenic to humans." The well-respected International Agency for Research on Cancer published a brief explanation of its conclusions in The Lancet and plans to issue ...

There's a researcher at the RAND Corporation who has been building a reputation as a curmudgeonly skeptic when it comes to trendy ways to fight America's obesity epidemic.

First, Roland Sturm took aim at the idea that "food deserts" — areas without well-stocked grocery stores — cause unhealthy diets ...

For the past two years, at an undisclosed location in the Upper Midwest, a large commercial egg farm has been probed with every tool of modern science. Researchers have collected data on feed consumed, eggs produced, rates of chicken death and injury, levels of dust in the air, microbial contamination ...

In the heart of California's Central Valley, a vast expanse of orchards, vineyards, and vegetable fields, lies a small collection of aging peach trees. Farmer Mas Masumoto's decision to preserve those trees, and then to write about it, became a symbol of resistance to machine-driven food production.

Yet the Masumoto ...

When it comes to the current controversy over antibiotic use on farm animals, milk is in a special category.

Lactating cows, unlike hogs, cattle or chickens that are raised for their meat, don't receive antibiotics unless they are actually sick. That's because drug residues immediately appear in the cow's milk ...

Produce growers often rely on workers who are in the U.S. illegally. Some farmers worry that if those workers gain legal status, they will leave agriculture. But some workers say they would stay.

Government regulators have approved the first genetically modified apples, which don't turn brown when you cut them open. But planting these trees will be a gamble since consumers may not want them.

The future of strawberry breeding at the University of California has been secured. Perhaps.

As we reported last summer, more than half of the strawberries that you pick up in supermarkets got their start in greenhouses and test plots at the University of California, Davis. It's one of the ...

Des Moines, Iowa, wants to control nitrate pollution in nearby rivers. It's often called fertilizer runoff. But the best way to reduce it involves planting different crops, not using less fertilizer.

Here at The Salt, we have been overwhelmed with emails brimming with factoids and completely unsubstantiated assertions about the food that Americans will consume on Sunday as they watch gigantic athletes burn through calories at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

In fact, this has become a vicious competition ...

For more than a year, a once-popular drug that makes cattle put on weight faster has been stuck in a kind of veterinary purgatory.

As far as the Food and Drug Administration is concerned, the drug, Zilmax, is legal to use. But large meat packers, which dominate the industry, have ...

The government wants to make your chicken meat safer to handle. The USDA is proposing legal limits on the chicken parts that are contaminated with salmonella bacteria.