High Country News

Farm incubators help would-be farmers succeed on their own

Viva Farms is a "farm incubator" in Washington's Skagit Valley that helps aspiring cash-poor farmers like Nelida Martinez start and successfully operate their own businesses.

by Jennifer Langston, Nov 28, 2011
Plowing under the fields of shame

Rebecca Clarren talks to migrant farmworker women about a threat they face every day in the fields: sexual harassment and assault by coworkers and bosses.

by Rebecca Clarren, Apr 14, 2008
The persistence of a golden time in the West

Seventy years after the publication of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, migrant workers still roam the West, eking out a tough living in its orchards and farm fields.

by David Frey , Apr 24, 2009
Bordering on injustice

Jimmy Santiago Baca's novel A Glass of Water compassionately describes the lives of Mexican immigrants.

by Don Waters, Sep 13, 2009
The fruits of their labor

In Delta County, Colorado, a pilot program sent prisoners to work on three farms during the summer of 2008.

by Marty Durlin, Andrea Appleton, Jay Canode and Emily Steinmetz, Oct 10, 2008
A literary organization tackles California gang violence

The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif., is honoring the Nobel Prize-winning author by helping at-risk youth in the community he wrote about.

by Taylor Wiles, May 01, 2012
Backbreaking work props up 'sustainable' crops

California farmworkers fight for stricter regulations on hand weeding, only to find themselves at odds with organic farmers.

by Lissa James, May 02, 2005
Follow-up

Gale Norton blasts environmentalists; California farmworkers sprayed with pesticides; ranchers have to keep paying beef checkoffs

by Laura Paskus, Jun 13, 2005
In the orchards, questions about immigration reform

In Yakima County, Wash., the California-based labor contractor Global Horizons is stirring up controversy among local Latino farmworkers by bringing in hundreds of guest workers from Thailand to pick fruit

by Tony Barboza, Sep 19, 2005
The red, white and blue of ‘red or green?’

New Mexico’s traditional chile industry faces hot competition from global producers

by Laura Paskus, Jun 25, 2007