The Biden administration on Wednesday said that it would begin requiring dairy cows moving across state lines to be tested for bird flu, which has been spreading in herds for months. The new policy is part of a growing effort to stamp out the spread of a virus that federal health officials have sought to […]
Read More
The bird flu outbreak in American dairy cattle may have begun in January, or even as early as December, a new analysis of genetic data suggests. The Department of Agriculture announced in late March that dairy cattle in Texas and Kansas had tested positive for the virus, called H5N1. It has since reported cases in […]
Read More
Federal regulators on Tuesday said that samples of pasteurized milk from around the country had tested positive for inactive remnants of the bird flu virus that has been infecting dairy cows. The viral fragments do not pose a threat to consumers, officials said. “To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that […]
Read More
What makes a desert tortoise happy? Before you answer, we should be more specific: We’re talking about a Sonoran desert tortoise, one of a few species of drab, stocky tortoises native to North America’s most arid landscapes. Adapted to the rocky crevices that striate the hills from western Arizona to northern Mexico, this long-lived reptile […]
Read More
In Arizona’s deeply conservative La Paz County, the most urgent issue facing many voters is not inflation or illegal immigration. It is the water being pumped from under their feet. Giant farms have turned Arizona’s remote deserts about 100 miles west of Phoenix as green as fairways — the product of extracting an ocean of […]
Read More
Special thanks to Andrew Jacobs. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, […]
Read More
In her three decades of working with elephant seals, Dr. Marcela Uhart had never seen anything like the scene on the beaches of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula last October. It was peak breeding season; the beach should have been teeming with harems of fertile females and enormous males battling one another for dominance. Instead, it was […]
Read More
Loren Brey, a poultry grower in Minnesota, walked onto the farm where his egg-laying turkeys nest in November to discover a handful of hens, dead from the highly pathogenic avian flu. Within a week, he lost nearly half of his entire flock. So when Mr. Brey’s turkeys began producing eggs again in the spring, he […]
Read More
Loren Brey, a poultry grower in Minnesota, walked onto the farm where his egg-laying turkeys nest in November to discover a handful of hens, dead from the highly pathogenic avian flu. Within a week, he lost nearly half of his entire flock. So when Mr. Brey’s turkeys began producing eggs again in the spring, he […]
Read More
In the month since federal authorities announced an outbreak of bird flu on dairy farms, they have repeatedly reassured the public that the spate of infections does not impact the nation’s food or milk supply, and poses little risk to the public. Yet the outbreak among cows may be more serious than originally believed. In […]
Read More
David McCormick’s origin story goes something like this: He grew up in rural Pennsylvania, southwest of Scranton. He baled hay, trimmed Christmas trees and otherwise worked on his family’s farm. And from those humble beginnings, he rose to achieve the American dream. “I spent most of my life in Pennsylvania, growing up in Bloomsburg on […]
Read More
On a cool, windy day in February, two big white dogs escaped from a well-known nonprofit farm in Westchester County and ended up on a public footpath deep in a New York State park. They encountered a 10-pound miniature poodle on a leash. The larger dogs attacked, killing the poodle and then severely injuring its […]
Read More
An estimated 20 million people in southern Africa are facing what the United Nations calls “acute hunger” as one of the worst droughts in more than four decades shrivels crops, decimates livestock and, after years of rising food prices brought on by pandemic and war, spikes the price of corn, the region’s staple crop. Malawi, […]
Read More
Sam Sanchez, a Chicago restaurateur, was incensed when President Biden announced last September that his administration would extend work eligibility to nearly half a million Venezuelans, many of them migrants who had recently crossed the border illegally. What about his undocumented employees like Ruben, a Mexican father of two U.S.-born children who has been in […]
Read More
The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea estates of India’s Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on the lush hillsides. But life can be tough. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near […]
Read More
There are certain things the fashion industry will always love: The young and beautiful. Art and money. Nostalgia. A comeback. From time to time, it also loves to throw itself behind a cause. By those metrics, Dan Colen is giving fashion a lot to love right now. A blue-chip artist represented by the mega-gallery Gagosian, […]
Read More There are certain things the fashion industry will always love: The young and beautiful. Art and money. Nostalgia. A comeback. From time to time, it also loves to throw itself behind a cause. By those metrics, Dan Colen is giving fashion a lot to love right now. A blue-chip artist represented by the mega-gallery Gagosian, […]
Read More
The Agriculture Department said on Tuesday that low-income women and children eligible for a food aid program would receive more cash for purchases of fruits and vegetables, with less assistance available for milk. The final rule by the department puts the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, a federally funded program known […]
Read More
When it came to wildfires, 2021 was an increasingly common kind of year in Montana: Flames consumed 747,000 acres, an area nearly the size of Long Island. About 2,700 of those acres were on Don Harland’s Sheep Creek Ranch, where ever-drier summers have turned lodgepole pines into matchsticks ready to ignite. After the smoke cleared, […]
Read More
The highly lethal form of avian influenza circulating the globe since 2021 has killed tens of millions of birds, forced poultry farmers in the United States to slaughter entire flocks and prompted a brief but alarming spike in the price of eggs. Most recently, it has infected dairy cows in several states and at least […]
Read More
With no windows, the gloomy, gray building looming four stories above the rice fields in a remote village in Indonesian Borneo resembles nothing more than a prison. Hundreds of similar concrete structures, riddled with small holes for ventilation, tower over village shops and homes all along Borneo’s northwestern coast. But these buildings are not for […]
Read More
At least one person in Texas has been diagnosed with bird flu following contact with dairy cows presumed to be infected, state officials said on Monday. The announcement adds a worrying dimension to an outbreak that has affected millions of birds and sea mammals worldwide and, most recently, cows in the United States. So far, […]
Read More
Gazing out from his 265-acre farm to the silhouetted Jura mountains in the distance, Jean-Michel Sibelle expounded on the intricate secrets of soil, climate and breeding that have made his chickens — blue feet, white feathers, red combs in the colors of France — the royalty of poultry. The “poulet de Bresse” is no ordinary […]
Read More