Beat
How food is grown, moved, and priced — the system behind the plate.
The farm-equipment slump shows how a small dip at the field becomes a big swing at the factory →
Tractor and seed makers had a rough quarter as farmers deferred big purchases - a wobble that grows louder the further up the food chain it travels.
When the drought hits every field at once →
A record-dry July pushed more than half of England into drought, halved some UK vegetable harvests, and sent produce prices sharply higher - as the usual import backstop, Europe, bakes too.
US farmland tops $6,000 an acre for the first time - while the farmers on it aren't cashing in →
Cropland hit a record even as grain prices slid and beef farmers earned less. Farming's relentless efficiency drive keeps paying off - just not for the farmer.
Africa's new export boom is fruit, not gold - and it shows what trade is really for →
African countries are getting rich on blueberries and citrus while Britain buys Spanish broccoli and China builds its own cattle herd - three moves in one argument about who should grow what.
A strong El Nino is coming for the world's staple crops - and the poorest eat the risk first →
The UN's weather agency says a strong El Nino will intensify from August, threatening harvests across Africa and Asia. Where families lean on one cheap staple, a price rise hits hardest.
Grain prices whipsawed all July - and a farmer's hardest call is when to sell →
December corn futures ran from $5.06 to $4.26 and back near $4.92 in ten weeks, while soybeans slid and wheat climbed on Black Sea shipping risks. The swings show why a grower's real gamble is not the harvest but the price it fetches.
A grain giant's big profit, and the case for owning your whole supply chain →
Bunge's earnings beat came from a step it owns outright - crushing oilseeds - while its rivals buy across the market and pocket less.
A lettuce scare shows why fresh food is the riskiest thing a farmer can grow →
A parasite outbreak tied to Mexican lettuce has cut US restaurant salad sales just as growers face a crop that spoils in days. Plus soybeans slide on good weather, wildfires threaten Bordeaux's grapes, and a US city opens grocery stores that undercut the shelf by 30 percent.
The cattle border reopens - and the meatpackers cheer, not the ranchers →
US ports reopen to Mexican cattle after a screwworm ban, Tyson and JBS shares jump, and farm-gate prices slide - a plain lesson in who holds the power when a few buyers face many sellers.
The US cattle herd grows for the first time since 2018 - and prices are already falling →
A USDA report shows the long shrink in America's cattle herd has bottomed out. Yet beef futures are dropping, because traders can already see the extra supply coming years down the line.
The cost of eating is squeezing the poorest - from the grocery aisle to the food-stamp card →
A UN report says one in three people can't afford a healthy diet, US grocery prices logged their biggest jump in 50 years, and 7.4m UK households are going without essentials. The same food-price rise lands hardest on those who spend the biggest share of their money on food.
Coffee jumps a quarter in a month - and the reason is a room full of traders, not a frost →
A trading scramble in New York pushed coffee well above $3 a pound, while grain prices climbed, cocoa kept squeezing chocolate makers, and 1.6 million dozen eggs were pulled over salmonella.
Trump's new tariffs take aim at the walls countries build around their farms →
A fresh round of US duties on about 60 trading partners lands hardest on farm protections — Canada's dairy wall above all — reopening the oldest question in trade: grow it at home, or buy it cheaper abroad.
Brazil's 20-year soybean boom hits pause as US crop losses head for a sixth straight year →
Years of overplanting drove grain prices below breakeven. Now farmers on two continents are slamming the brakes — and the businesses that sell them seed, fertilizer, and machinery are next in line to feel it.
Brands are ditching seed oils for beef tallow — and the whole fats shelf is repricing →
A swing toward beef tallow, India's rush to import cooking oil, and Lindt's stalled prices are one story: pull on any food price and the ones around it move too.
Washington bets AI can save the farm — farmers say their problem is the price of everything →
A bipartisan bill would push artificial intelligence onto US farms as the fix for a deepening income crisis. But a fresh survey finds most farmers see no benefit yet, and name the real squeeze themselves: input costs and crop prices set far from the farm gate. Meanwhile drought tightens across Europe and the Horn of Africa.
Farmers say the fertilizer market is rigged — and asked Washington to open the books →
Seventeen grower groups pushed for a federal antitrust probe of a fertilizer industry now down to a handful of firms, as input costs drive farms toward record losses.
Cattle futures fell $15 in two weeks — while the USDA raised its beef forecast to a record →
Traders sold cattle hard this month even as the government lifted its price forecast to an all-time high. Both can be true, because the animals behind the price take about three years to make. Plus: corn growers ask the Justice Department to look at fertilizer, wheat jumps on Black Sea strikes, and Cornwall's fishers meet species they have no gear for.
A study says junk food may drive a third of heart disease — as regulators fight over what 'junk' even means →
New research links ultra-processed food to a large share of heart-disease deaths, just as the FDA and USDA struggle to define the category at all. The problem may be that our whole way of judging food looks at the wrong thing.
One field, five states, many logos: a parasite in Taco Bell's lettuce reveals how few hands your food passes through →
A cyclospora outbreak traced to a single lettuce supplier sickened people across five states — and exposed how many separate-looking brands quietly share the same processor. Plus the stalled fight to even define "ultra-processed," and a call to investigate fertilizer pricing.
A common pesticide is quietly harming the bees that pollinate a third of our food — while its makers keep winning in court →
New research finds a widely used pesticide damages bumblebee reproduction at low doses, even as pesticide firms stack legal wins over health and environmental groups. Out West, drought forces the same hard question — when something runs short, who loses first?
The farm-labor visa everyone dislikes just keeps growing — and Washington can't agree how to fix it →
Use of the H-2A seasonal-farmworker visa has jumped more than 500% in a decade, even as farmers, labor groups, and both parties call it broken. Plus cooling grocery prices, cheaper milk, a cattle-killing fly, and fish in Senegal's rice fields.
A "super" El Niño is forming — and analysts warn it could push global food prices up into 2028 →
Economists say a historically strong El Niño could jolt world food prices while the Iran war is already lifting them — two shocks landing at once on the same shelves.
US crops have sold below cost for 50 years — the hidden safety net under cheap food is now being pulled from small farms →
A new study shows America's major crops have never paid for themselves on the open market; public programs quietly fill the gap every year. As that support tightens, the biggest operations keep their share while small and new farmers are cut first.
John Deere agrees to let farmers fix their own tractors again — a decade after it locked them out →
A landmark repair settlement, a margin squeeze on US growers, jumpy grain markets, and a drought in Uganda that killed before it reached any market.
An egg protein made without hens just went national — and precision fermentation is having its grocery-aisle moment →
The Every Company is quadrupling output after its animal-free egg white landed in Walmart and Target, orders up 550%. Behind it: a quiet shift where scarce food proteins get brewed by microbes instead of pulled from animals. Plus grocery prices cool, China restarts soybean buying, and cheap cameras start spotting crop disease.
USDA published a beef export number the market refused to believe — a week later it cut it by 90% →
A wildly wrong official figure got caught on sight, exposing how much the food market runs on trust in numbers that fewer people are left to check.
A stomach parasite has hit 1,000 people in 18 states — and the food that carried it may never be found →
A fast-growing cyclospora outbreak shows how the way fresh produce is grown, pooled, and eaten can erase the trail back to its source before investigators can follow it.
An Indian state pulls eggs from millions of school lunches — and the kids who need the protein most weren't asked →
West Bengal is swapping eggs for vegetarian meals in some Kolkata school lunches, reigniting a fight over who decides what poor children eat. Plus a widening US food-safety gap and a look at who the meat system's subsidies actually reach.
A war closed one strait — and the fertilizer that feeds half the world got 70% dearer overnight →
A Middle East war and a closed shipping lane sent nitrogen fertilizer prices soaring, and governments are scrambling. The story exposes how much of the modern harvest quietly runs on a factory-made input priced by things that have nothing to do with farming.
A cooking-oil giant says its US market is shrinking — because of who its customers are, not what it sells →
The maker of Mazola oil told investors that immigration raids and financial strain on Latino households are quietly draining a whole commodity market — while a beef shortage, a farm-labour bill, and an egg price-fixing settlement all trace back to the same thing: who is in the food system, and who isn't.
Trump orders American farms to 'go regenerative' — and attaches no money to do it →
A new executive order tells farmers to heal their soil and cut chemical use, but adds no new funding — while the USDA offices meant to help them shed a fifth of their staff. Plus: India's driest June in over a decade, record beef, and an egg cartel settles.
The UK's biggest doner maker sold '70% lamb' kebabs that were 'less than 10% sheep' — and it took DNA tests to catch it →
A £6m food fraud went undetected for years because no customer could see what was in a kebab. It was random DNA testing, not a complaint, that finally exposed it.
The world's biggest chocolate makers are quietly building a Plan B — one with less cocoa in it →
Record cocoa prices have pushed Mars, Nestlé, Lindt and Barry Callebaut from defending cocoa to replacing it — with fermented sunflower seed, lab-grown cells, and reformulated recipes. Plus a $3.3M egg price-fixing settlement, mounting baby-formula recalls, and a 650,000-bag chip recall.
The world now farms 95 billion animals — and the land to feed them is where nature loses →
A landmark report finds farmed animals up 50% in two decades, with the real pressure falling not on the animals but on the cropland and water it takes to feed them.
California scraps 'sell by' dates — the label most people read as a deadline was never a safety test →
A new California law that took effect July 1 bans consumer-facing 'sell by' dates on packaged food, standardises the rest, and targets a simple, costly confusion: shoppers throwing out good food because they misread a manufacturer's freshness guess as a safety rule.