The Farm Report

By Heritage Radio Network

What's The Farm Report about?

The Farm Report is a show about the people, processes, and policies that shape how food is produced today. From the latest agricultural innovations to the day-to-day challenges of running a viable business growing vegetables and grazing cattle, host Lisa Elaine Held engages in conversations with farmers and farmworkers and the people who work alongside them—like chefs, researchers, activists, and investors. Expect from-the-field insights paired with real-world context as guests explore how producing fresh, delicious food relates to environmental and community sustainability, equality and justice, politics and policy, and better health.

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Why Cover Crops Are Unlikel...

07.14.2021

Cover crops are good for soil health, water quality, and climate resilience, and while more farmers are planting them compared to a decade ago, the number of covered acres is still miniscule compared to the amount of cropland that goes ...

The Farm Report episodes:

07.14.2021 Why Cover Crops Are Unlikely to Deliver Climate Benefits Anytime Soon Cover crops are good for soil health, water quality, and climate resilience, and while more farmers are planting them compared to a decade ago, the number of covered acres is still miniscule compared to the amount of cropland that goes ...
06.17.2021 A Local Food App Created For and by Farmers Lindsey Lusher Shute began working on the concept for GrownBy during her time at the National Young Farmers Coalition, because young farmers expressed a need for better technology that could help them sell their food. Now, after testing the platform ...
05.26.2021 Urban Farming in St. Louis After observing how much the quality and variety of produce sold in grocery stores differed in neighborhoods across St. Louis, Tyrean Lewis started Heru Urban Farming to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to food apartheid communities. In this episode, he ...
05.06.2021 Fighting for Black Farmers’ Land The American agricultural system was built based on the enslavement of African people, and since emancipation, systematic discrimination against Black people within agriculture has persisted. In 1920, close to 1 million Black farmers made up about 14 percent of America’s ...
03.31.2021 Small Farms and the Post-Pandemic Unknown At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people began buying more local food directly from small farms in their communities, and some farmers scrambled to meet increased demand. A year later, as planting kicks off for the 2021 season, ...
03.11.2021 Untold Stories of Urban Farming From massive venture capital-funded vertical farms and rooftop CSA operations to community gardens and windowsill pots, what does growing food in cities look like? And, more importantly, why are people doing it? That’s the focus of Fields, a new podcast ...
02.24.2021 An Organic Dairy Coop's Climate Plans Organic Valley is America’s largest cooperative of organic farmers, representing more than 1,800 farmers in 34 US States, most in dairy. You’ve likely seen their milk, yogurt, and cheeses at the grocery store. This month, the company released its 2021 ...
02.10.2021 A Sustainable Food and Farm Policy Forecast for 2021 (and Beyond) President Joe Biden took office 21 days ago, and the White House is already making moves that will affect food and agriculture. Plus, the shift in Congress means it’s also a new chapter for food and farm legislation. In this ...
01.27.2021 Inside Pasa Sustainable Agriculture The Pasa conference is one of the year's most popular events for sustainable and organic farmers—in Pennsylvania and beyond. As it kicks off (digitally), executive director Hannah Smith-Brubaker talks to host Lisa Held about the important topics represented this year ...
01.20.2021 Investing in a Sustainable Food Future Most capital invested in agriculture in the U.S. flows to large, commodity farms. For smaller operations that don’t fit the conventional mold, it can be difficult—if not impossible—to get a loan. Steward aims to change that by connecting online investors ...
12.16.2020 Are Alt Meats Better for the Planet? Forecasts point to the market for plant- and cell-based meat alternatives exploding over the next decade, largely because of the sustainability claims companies make when marketing these food products. But while it’s true that diets that include more plants and ...
12.02.2020 Perilous Bounty Centralized, uber-efficient, industrialized agriculture is often presented as necessary to “feed the world.” In his new book, Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, veteran food, agriculture, and climate journalist Tom Philpott argues ...
11.18.2020 Agroforestry 101 Producing food requires land. As a result, forests are often razed to make space for crops or animals, creating environmental tradeoffs. But what if there were a middle ground between forest and farmland? In this episode, host Lisa Held explores ...
11.04.2020 A Small Farm IPO? Vital Farms started on a Texas farm with 20 chickens. This year, the pasture-raised egg company went public. In between, the company bucked the typical model of scaling up in animal agriculture by building a network of small farms that ...
10.21.2020 Rural Vote: Dispatch from the Campaign Trail When it comes to election day, political pundits love to discuss which way “farmers” are going to vote. In the case of this election, the prevailing idea is that most farmers—especially commodity growers in the Midwest—will vote for President Trump. ...
10.07.2020 Presenting Jupiter's Almanac: Welcome to Gilliard Farms This week The Farm Report is proud to present Jupiter's Almanac. On this inaugural episode, host Matthew Raiford introduces himself, along with his family history and the history of his farm. These lineages go hand in hand, dating back nearly ...
09.23.2020 Growing Produce—and Food Sovereignty—in Black Communities Reverend Dr. Heber Brown, a Baltimore pastor, community organizer, and beginner farmer, started the Black Church Food Security Network in the wake of the city’s Freddie Gray uprisings in 2015. Since then, he’s been connecting farmers and faith communities in ...
09.11.2020 Organic Agriculture: Past, Present, and Future J.I. Rodale wrote “healthy soil = healthy food = healthy people” on a blackboard in 1942, and that has been the mantra at the Rodale Institute, created in 1947, ever since. In this sitdown at Rodale’s research farm in Kutztown, ...
08.12.2020 COVID-19 and Local Food: Challenges and Opportunities Despite challenges like shuttered farmers' markets and restaurants, a shortage of meat processors, and the scramble to move sales online, small and mid-size farmers have demonstrated real resilience during COVID-19, even as other parts of the food system shut down. ...
07.29.2020 Urban Farming in Atlanta, Patch by Patch Jamila Norman had a vision to “just find green patches of land in the city and turn them into farms”—and she made it a reality. In this episode, Norman talks to host Lisa Held about how, today, she packs maximum ...
07.15.2020 How to Be a "Restaurant Farm" in 2020 Chefs in Baltimore and Washington D.C. have always been Karma Farm’s best, and primary, customers. So what happens when restaurants shut down? In this episode, host Lisa Held talks to farmer Jon Shaw about how his diversified vegetable farm in ...
07.08.2020 Presenting Behind the Label with American Humane This week we're presenting the first episode of Behind the Label with American Humane, a new series from Heritage Radio Network. Behind the Label with American Humane takes listeners from the grocery store aisle to the farm – explaining what ...
07.01.2020 Linking Local Farms and Food Insecure Families Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment—and therefore food insecurity—has skyrocketed. At the same time, farmers that sell their food at farmers markets have faced multiple economic challenges, as they lost sales to restaurants and some markets shut down in the ...
06.24.2020 "Glocal" Food and Community in Newark The Occupy Wall Street movement introduced Tobias Fox to different ways of thinking about the world and what he wanted to do with his life. He took that inspiration and started growing food in community gardens in Newark, New Jersey. ...
06.11.2020 A Good Egg Most eggs in the United States today come from farms that crowd hundreds of thousands of laying hens indoors. Handsome Brook Farms does things differently. In this episode, CEO Jordan Czeizler talks to host Lisa Held about how the company ...
05.27.2020 Chicago's Top Butcher Talks Local Meat Since the pandemic hit, the industrial meat system has been upended. That's made things interesting for small livestock producers selling into local markets. In this episode, Publican Quality Meats head butcher Rob Levitt talks to host Lisa Held about how ...
05.20.2020 From Teaching Students to Feeding Families When schools in Birmingham, Alabama shut down, Jones Valley Teaching Farms’ executive director Amanda Storey had to figure out how to best utilize the organization’s seven teaching farms. In this episode, Storey talks to host Lisa Held about how the ...
05.13.2020 How Mike's Organic Is Connecting Farmers to Home Cooks In Connecticut, Mike's Organic Market sources fresh food from small farms to sell to local eaters. Now, in the face of COVID-19, founder Mike Geller is ramping up delivery options and CSA boxes to get more fresh food to people ...
05.06.2020 Yes, Even Chocolate Starts on a Farm The pandemic drags on, so this is the episode in which we talk about one of the few things that really helps: chocolate. The Farm Report's 2020 season is focused on how farmers and others in the food system are ...
04.15.2020 BrightFarms Is Growing (Greens) During COVID-19 At its five hydroponic greenhouse farms, BrightFarms grows a lot of “salad.” And while the coronavirus pandemic has hurt many farm businesses, it has increased demand for the company’s leafy greens. “We wake up with a sense of purpose,” says ...
04.08.2020 A Growing Pandemic: Farmers and Markets in NYC New York is now considered the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US, but GrowNYC has kept Greenmarkets open while adjusting operations to continue to serve the city’s residents and farmers. In this episode, GrowNYC’s director of farmer assistance, ...
04.01.2020 A Growing Pandemic: Ark Foods' Veggie Tales “We view the vegetable as our North Star,” says Noah Robbins, founder of Ark Foods. But lately, that star has been leading them in more unpredictable directions. In this episode, Robbins and Ark Foods COO Eduardo Mestre talk to host ...
03.19.2020 A Growing Pandemic: Impacts on the Mid-Atlantic Food System In this episode, recorded at an empty Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore, host Lisa Held talks to chef, restaurateur, and local food advocate Spike Gjerde. They discuss how the shuttering of restaurants like his is affecting farmers, food workers, and many ...
03.11.2020 A Neighborhood Farm’s Next Chapter Emma Jagoz started Moon Valley Farm in the suburbs outside of Baltimore, MD because she wanted a cheaper source of fresh, organic vegetables for her family. Starting with a garden, she bartered for small plots of land and grew the ...
02.26.2020 Hickory Nut Gap Builds "Community Through Agriculture" Jamie Ager’s family has been stewarding the land that is now Hickory Nut Gap Farm in the mountains of Western North Carolina since 1916. In this episode, he talks to host Lisa Held about his family’s legacy of supporting a ...
02.19.2020 Safer Spinach? Produce Growers Navigate New Rules With the rollout of rules related to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), many produce growers are now subject to food safety regulations for the first time. Some of those regulations seem like common sense, and others can be downright ...
02.12.2020 PFAS: From the Farmer that Sounded the Alarm to Today’s Data “These chemicals are not emerging, it’s our awareness that’s emerging,” Rober Bilott says. Bilott, a lawyer who exposed the fact that DuPont had been polluting the environment and drinking water with “forever chemicals” for decades—deserves credit for that fact. His ...
02.05.2020 Strengthening Regional Food Systems—in the Hudson Valley and Beyond Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming has been working on building local, sustainable food systems for 20 years, via farmer training, agricultural coalitions, and more. In this episode, Glynwood president Kathleen Finlay talks to host Lisa Held about what ...
01.29.2020 The Farm Workforce Modernization Act Farmworker justice groups are split in terms of supporting or opposing this new piece of legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for some undocumented workers, mandate farmers electronically verify worker legal status, and make changes to the H-2A ...
01.22.2020 Sustainable Agriculture in the Mid-Atlantic Future Harvest is the Mid-Atlantic’s most influential sustainable agriculture organization. Last week, it held its annual conference, titled “Farming for our Soil, Livelihood, and Community,” and close to 800 farmers and advocates from Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, and Washington ...
01.15.2020 From Sap to Syrup: Maple Production Today Arnold Coombs’ family has been tapping trees in Vermont and making maple syrup for seven generations. Today, Coombs Family Farms sources maple from 3,000 small family farms. Mark Isselhardt is a maple specialist at the University of Vermont extension school, ...
12.18.2019 Episode 383: How Farm’d Is Growing Atlanta’s Local Food System Chris Damico is the founder of Farm’d, a platform that connects local farms to restaurants in Atlanta, Georgia. In this episode, Damico talks to host Lisa Held about how the platform simplifies supply chain logistics to help farmers sell their ...
12.11.2019 Episode 382: Regeneration Education This year, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture launched a Regenerative Farming Fellowship program in partnership with the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC). In this episode, two of the farmers from the inaugural cohort—Drew Blankenbaker, a vegetable farmer ...
12.04.2019 Episode 381: “Grilled”: A Story of Changing the Chicken Industry Animal welfare activist Leah Garces, the current president of Mercy for Animals, has been fighting against industrial animal agriculture her entire career. In this episode, she talks to host Lisa Held about her new book "Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies ...
11.20.2019 Episode 380: Helping Dairy Farms Plan for the Future “No farms, no food,” is a slogan American Farmland Trust (AFT) popularized to describe the importance of its farmland conservation programs. Its newest program that speaks to that mission is Farmer Batch, a collaboration with Greek yogurt maker Chobani. Based ...
11.13.2019 Episode 379: Washington DC’s Urban Farming Trailblazer Gail Taylor started Three Part Harmony Farm three and a half miles from the White House. In the process, in addition to growing plenty of organic vegetables for the residents of DC, she also helped pass city legislation to make ...
11.06.2019 Episode 378: Cory Carman's Grass-Fed Vision The fourth-generation Oregon rancher worked in environmental policy before she moved home and converted her family’s ranch to a grass-fed cattle operation based on the principles of holistic management. Now, she’s partnered with other ranches nearby to create a new ...
10.30.2019 Episode 377: The Goat Milk (and Cheese) Moment According to The Washington Post, the number of dairy goats in the US is now climbing quickly. But Suzanne Behrmann, owner of Shepherd’s Way Creamery, got into milking goats a long time ago, simply because she liked them. Now, her ...
10.23.2019 Episode 376: Dear Sonny Perdue, Small Farms Matter United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue recently made a lot of farmers angry. At a time when small dairy farms are going out of business at unprecedented rates (and small farms producing other crops are also struggling), Perdue made ...
10.16.2019 Episode 375: Farming on the Wild Side Why take a “wild” approach to farming? Nancy Hayden has been co-owner of The Farm Between in Jeffersonville, VT for 28 years, and she’s the co-author of the new book, Farming on the Wild Side: The Evolution of a Regenerative ...

Older episodes

The Farm Report

What's The Farm Report about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Farm Report episodes:

Why Cover Crops Are Unlikely to Deliver Climate Benefits Anytime Soon

A Local Food App Created For and by Farmers

Urban Farming in St. Louis

Fighting for Black Farmers’ Land

Small Farms and the Post-Pandemic Unknown

Untold Stories of Urban Farming

An Organic Dairy Coop's Climate Plans

A Sustainable Food and Farm Policy Forecast for 2021 (and Beyond)

Inside Pasa Sustainable Agriculture

Investing in a Sustainable Food Future

Are Alt Meats Better for the Planet?

Perilous Bounty

Agroforestry 101

A Small Farm IPO?

Rural Vote: Dispatch from the Campaign Trail

Presenting Jupiter's Almanac: Welcome to Gilliard Farms

Growing Produce—and Food Sovereignty—in Black Communities

Organic Agriculture: Past, Present, and Future

COVID-19 and Local Food: Challenges and Opportunities

Urban Farming in Atlanta, Patch by Patch

How to Be a "Restaurant Farm" in 2020

Presenting Behind the Label with American Humane

Linking Local Farms and Food Insecure Families

"Glocal" Food and Community in Newark

A Good Egg

Chicago's Top Butcher Talks Local Meat

From Teaching Students to Feeding Families

How Mike's Organic Is Connecting Farmers to Home Cooks

Yes, Even Chocolate Starts on a Farm

BrightFarms Is Growing (Greens) During COVID-19

A Growing Pandemic: Farmers and Markets in NYC

A Growing Pandemic: Ark Foods' Veggie Tales

A Growing Pandemic: Impacts on the Mid-Atlantic Food System

A Neighborhood Farm’s Next Chapter

Hickory Nut Gap Builds "Community Through Agriculture"

Safer Spinach? Produce Growers Navigate New Rules

PFAS: From the Farmer that Sounded the Alarm to Today’s Data

Strengthening Regional Food Systems—in the Hudson Valley and Beyond

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act

Sustainable Agriculture in the Mid-Atlantic

From Sap to Syrup: Maple Production Today

Episode 383: How Farm’d Is Growing Atlanta’s Local Food System

Episode 382: Regeneration Education

Episode 381: “Grilled”: A Story of Changing the Chicken Industry

Episode 380: Helping Dairy Farms Plan for the Future

Episode 379: Washington DC’s Urban Farming Trailblazer

Episode 378: Cory Carman's Grass-Fed Vision

Episode 377: The Goat Milk (and Cheese) Moment

Episode 376: Dear Sonny Perdue, Small Farms Matter

Episode 375: Farming on the Wild Side

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