About Food & Environment Reporting Network

Food & Environment Reporting Network

The Food & Environment Reporting Network, known as FERN, is an independent, nonprofit news organization based in New York City that produces investigative and explanatory journalism on food, agriculture and environmental health. Founded in September 2010 and in operation since January 2011, FERN describes itself as the first independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to in-depth reporting in these critically under-reported areas. It does not primarily publish on its own front page; instead it partners with established local and national media outlets to co-publish its work in text, audio and video. Its website is thefern.org.

That partnership model defines everything about FERN. It is a newsroom without a traditional audience of its own subscribers, built instead to supply the kind of long, expensive reporting — following a food system from a farm or feedlot at one end to a plate or bowl at the other — that shrinking newsrooms at newspapers and magazines increasingly cannot fund alone.

Founding and first stories

FERN was founded in September 2010 by an initial team that included Samuel Fromartz, Tom Laskawy, Naomi Starkman and Paula Crossfield; a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation based in New York, it began operations in January 2011. Fromartz, a food and agriculture journalist, served as editor-in-chief in its early years. Early foundation support came from The 11th Hour Project, the McKnight Foundation, the Clarence Heller Foundation, the Columbia Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Its first published story set the pattern that followed: an investigation of pollution and the New Mexico dairy industry, reported by Stephanie Page Ogburn, which examined how one activist's efforts had influenced the state's regulation of manure runoff and dairy water, and which ran in High Country News. From the start, FERN's stories appeared under partner outlets' banners as often as its own, trading the visibility of a single destination site for the reach of established readerships.

The partnership model

FERN collaborates with partners to generate, edit and co-publish journalism in multiple formats, providing editorial and financial support that it describes as critical as budgets and staff at existing outlets continue to shrink. Its investigations have been published with major partners including The New York Times, Bloomberg, NPR and The Washington Post, alongside regional and specialist outlets such as High Country News, Reveal, Politico, Harvest Public Media and bioGraphic.

Because it is what it calls an impact-seeking rather than audience-seeking organization, FERN aims to create projects rather than one-off stories. A single reporting topic can be plugged into different channels — a magazine feature, a radio documentary, a podcast series, a short film — building a critical mass of reporting on a subject, reaching different audiences, and engaging communities of listeners, readers and viewers. It measures its progress through metrics that track reach, effect on public discourse and policy changes. FERN maintains a published code of ethics for its reporters and staff, posts its annual reports and tax filings on its site, and is governed as a donor-supported nonprofit; recent foundation supporters include The Schmidt Family Foundation, the Woodcock Foundation, the BAND Foundation, the Posner Foundation, the Broad Reach Foundation and the Joyce and Irving Goldman Foundation.

What FERN investigates

FERN's journalism grapples with how food is produced, its role in society, what people choose to eat, and why. Its stated concerns span the whole American food system: climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, agricultural practices, politics and resource scarcity, together with the concentration of economic power in the sector, conflicts over immigration, and the systemic legacies of racial inequity — forces it argues jeopardize food and worker safety, undercut farmers' ability to thrive, and leave the supply chain vulnerable.

In practice that means investigations into toxic chemicals in the food supply, the COVID-19 pandemic's passage through meatpacking plants and farm labor, child labor in food production, and the exploitation of immigrant and refugee workers. FERN says its reporting has directly influenced policy and government activity in areas including toxic chemicals, the pandemic and child labor. Its work has received National Magazine Award nominations and won James Beard Media Awards and Society of Professional Journalists awards, while maintaining, in its own words, a commitment to elevate diverse voices and marginalized communities.

Audio, podcasts and film

FERN has expanded steadily into multimedia storytelling. Its podcast Hot Farm told, in four parts, the stories of farmers in the American heartland experimenting with ways to use less water and chemicals, protect their soil and use renewable energy in the face of severe weather and climate change — and of those not yet convinced that change is required of them. Its REAP/SOW platform gathers its audio work, and its podcast Forked, co-hosted by FERN editor-in-chief Theodore Ross and Helena Bottemiller Evich of Food Fix, offers an insider's look at the politics and policy reshaping the American food system, launched with coverage of the Make America Healthy Again commission and federal food policy.

A representative recent project shows the multiformat method at work. Reporting by senior editor Ted Genoways on Haitian immigrant workers recruited to a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado — the world's largest meat processor's U.S. home — appeared as an audio collaboration with Reveal, in a version for Harvest Public Media, and in a co-published article with Politico, tracing how a viral social-media video drew more than a thousand Haitian workers to a plant short of labor, and what they found when they arrived. In September 2025 FERN capped a special issue, Food and Power in the West, produced with High Country News, with a podcast episode and a documentary short film in which Ross interviewed Genoways and fellow contributors on meatpacking labor, Rio Grande water and pecan growers, and the history of Chinese immigrants in America told through food.

Leadership and newsroom

FERN's current editor-in-chief is Theodore Ross, whose Editor's Desk columns frame the organization's projects and whose voice anchors much of its audio. Samuel Fromartz, the founding editor-in-chief, remains associated as editor at large. The staff is small for the scale of its output — directory listings put it in the range of a few dozen people at most — because the model multiplies its capacity through partner newsrooms and freelance contributors, including senior reporters and producers assigned to long projects rather than daily news.

The organization's New York base — its offices have been listed on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — places it near the national magazines, broadcasters and foundations with which it partners, while its reporting is deliberately national and rural in subject: dairies in New Mexico, feedlots and packing plants in Colorado and the Plains, farms in the Midwest, salmon processors in Alaska and bumblebee habitat in Patagonia have all featured in its recent work.

Why FERN exists

FERN was founded on a diagnosis that still animates it: food, agriculture and environmental health are critically under-reported, even though agriculture accounts for a significant share of national greenhouse gas emissions and the food system touches every person's health daily. Investigative reporting in this area is slow and costly — it requires travel to rural places, scientific literacy, and months inside industries that prefer opacity — exactly the reporting that advertising-supported news economics cut first.

The nonprofit, partnership answer FERN built has since become a template in American journalism: raise philanthropic money centrally, spend it on reporting, and distribute the results through outlets that still command audiences. FERN's founders articulated the wager early — that the future of media would require partnerships between nonprofit and for-profit outlets to produce costly and critical stories, and to support them after publication.

Audience, republication and influence

Because FERN's stories live primarily on partner sites and broadcasts, its audience is the combined audience of those partners — readers of national newspapers and magazines, listeners to public radio and podcasts, and viewers of documentary shorts — rather than a single subscription list. That arrangement also means its work is frequently republished, excerpted and cited by other outlets following up its findings, extending the life of an investigation beyond its original placement. FERN supports that afterlife deliberately: its founding premise held that nonprofit producers should provide communications support after publication, not simply hand a story over, and its current practice of building podcasts, films and social content around a reporting project serves the same end — keeping a subject in public discussion long enough for regulators, legislators, companies and consumers to respond. When FERN says its reporting has influenced policy and government activity on toxic chemicals, pandemic response and child labor, it is describing this whole chain, from reporting through partnership publication to sustained attention, as its product.

FERN today

Today FERN continues to operate from New York City as a donor-supported nonprofit newsroom, publishing investigations with national and regional partners, producing podcasts including Forked and series under REAP/SOW, releasing occasional documentary work, and posting its reporting at thefern.org. Its recent agenda — food policy under a new federal health leadership, consolidation in seafood and meat, ultra-processed foods, farm labor and immigration enforcement, and farmers adapting to a changing climate — tracks the live arguments about how America eats.

For WorldNM readers, FERN is best filed mentally alongside the great specialist nonprofits: not a place where you read the day's headlines, but the organization whose name in a byline signals that a food story has been dug into deeply, checked carefully, and placed where it is most likely to change something.