After 22 years of raising chickens for Perdue, one brave factory farmer Craig Watts was at his breaking point and did something no one has done before. He invited us, as farm animal welfare advocates, to his farm to film and tell his story.

Once you’ve welcomed avocado toast in your life, it’s hard to imagine going without it. But that’s a sacrifice we might need to make as a nation soon, as interest in avocadoes has tripled in the past three decades and farmers are having trouble keeping pace. National Geographic reports that the creamy green fruit may be headed toward a “quinoa moment,” ie, that global demand...

The tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers arrive year-round by the ton, with peel-off stickers proclaiming "Product of Mexico." Farm exports to the U.S. from Mexico have tripled to $7.6 billion in the last decade, enriching agribusinesses, distributors and retailers. American consumers get all the salsa, squash and melons they can eat at affordable prices. And top U.S. brands — Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Subway and Safeway, among many others — profit from produce they have come to depend on.

The last few years have been plentiful ones for Maine’s lobstermen. While New England’s other iconic fishery — cod — went belly-up, crustacean landings exploded to 125 million pounds in 2012 and 2013, five times the historic average and enough meat to give every American a lobster roll (with leftovers to spare). If anything, Maine’s biggest problem has been too many lobsters: The decapods were so abundant last year that prices crashed.

Goat is the most widely consumed red meat in the world. So why does it so rarely make it onto Americans' tables? Trying to solve that problem is Heritage Foods USA’s No Goat Left Behind program, which has given the goat meat industry a small but stable boost. The organization connects dairy goat farmers that have extra kids to New York City restaurants who want to try out the meat. The culmination of this program takes place in October...

In the next 40 years, humans will need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000 put together. But with sprawling cities gobbling up arable land, agricultural productivity gains decreasing, and demand for biofuels increasing, supply is not keeping up with demand. Clever farmers, scientists and entrepreneurs are bursting with ideas. But they need money to make this jump.

The statistics for this incredibly successful indoor farming endeavor in Japan are staggering: 25,000 square feet producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day (100 times more per square foot than traditional methods) with 40% less power, 80% less food waste and 99% less water usage than outdoor fields. But the freshest news from the farm: a new facility using the same technologies has been announced and is now under construction in Hong Kong...

Charleston is a city steeped in nostalgia, where trailing Spanish moss and antebellum architecture transport visitors to another time. But for a true time-traveling experience, one need look no further than an unassuming plot of land in the Lowcountry, just outside of the city. In one field grows the now largely forgotten Jimmy Red corn, originally used in moonshine and grits. In another grows Carolina Gold rice, the grandfather of today’s American long-grain varieties.

Demand for foods certified as GMO-free is ballooning. Increasingly, it's conventional companies that want to earn the label. Here's how a company gets into the non-GMO game.

For most of my life, I have been severely prejudiced against the potato. Like many Americans, I regarded potatoes as among the most banal of vegetables. They were clearly less interesting than other tubers and roots, lacking the lip-staining intensity of the beet, the bright color and crunch of the carrot, the surprising heat of the radish. Potatoes were just generic lumps of starch best used as couriers for salt, fat and ketchup.

I squatted down in the dirt and took stock of my inadequate tools. Over my left shoulder a massive John Deere tractor loomed. I came here to fix that tractor. So far, things weren’t going as planned. I’m a computer programmer by training, and a repairman by trade. Ten years ago, I started iFixit, an online, DIY community that teaches people to repair what they own. Repair is what I do, and that I was being rebuffed by a tractor was incredibly frustrating.

The federal raids in Alta Floresta, Brazil surprised locals in 2005. The year before, nearly 60,000 acres of rainforest had been torn out of the municipality. Now farmers and loggers were being arrested by armed police, accused of environmental crimes. “It was a radical operation,” the newly elected mayor later recalled during an interview with a Princeton University researcher. “All our economic activity stopped.”

On the radio this morning I heard a story about the growing number of young people choosing to become farmers. The farmers in the story sounded a lot like me — in their late 20s to mid-30s, committed to organic practices, holding college degrees, and from middle-class non-farming backgrounds. Some raise animals or tend orchards. Others, like me, grow vegetables. The farmers’ days sounded long but fulfilling, drenched in sun and dirt. The story was uplifting, a nice...

Across the U.S. Midwest, the plunge in grain prices to near four-year lows is pitting landowners determined to sustain rental incomes against farmer tenants worried about making rent payments.

Jackson, Wyoming, is an unlikely place for urban farming: At an altitude over a mile high, with snow that can last until May, the growing season is sometimes only a couple of months long. It's also an expensive place to plant a garden, since an average vacant lot can cost well over $1 million. But the town is about to become home to one of the only vertical farms in the world. On a thin slice of vacant land next to a parking lot, a startup called Vertical Harvest recently broke ground on...

Warmer temperatures in Alaska are giving farmers flexibility to plant a wider range of crops over a longer growing season. One farmer says the secret to his bounty is soil enriched by flooding rivers.

Say the words “California and economy” and most people today think of Silicon Valley with its multi-billion dollar valuations and manic focus on what’s going to be the next Square or SnapChat. But drive inland from the Pacific Coast and other valleys open up. Valleys steeped in history like the Salinas, the San Joaquin and Sacramento.

Every year, cows kill more people than sharks. And yet nobody ever makes a horror movie about them, and there's no Cow Week. These deadly beasts have managed to stay completely under the radar... until now. Find out just why cows are so deadly.

Animal health experts and poultry growers are scrambling to determine how a dangerous new strain of bird flu infected turkey flocks in three states — and to stop it from spreading.

Heirloom peach trees, and an essay about them, turned one California farm into a landmark of local food. It's now the scene of another unconventional choice: a daughter's return to take the helm.