Dan Charles
Dan Charles is NPR's food and agriculture correspondent.
Primarily responsible for covering farming and the food industry, Charles focuses on the stories of culture, business, and the science behind what arrives on your dinner plate.
This is his second time working for NPR; from 1993 to 1999, Charles was a technology correspondent at NPR. He returned in 2011.
During his time away from NPR, Charles was an independent writer and radio producer and occasionally filled in at NPR on the Science and National desks, and at Weekend Edition. Over the course of his career Charles has reported on software engineers in India, fertilizer use in China, dengue fever in Peru, alternative medicine in Germany, and efforts to turn around a troubled school in Washington, DC.
In 2009-2010, he taught journalism in Ukraine through the Fulbright program. He has been guest researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1990 to 1993, Charles was a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist, a major British science magazine.
The author of two books, Charles wrote Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, The Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (Ecco, 2005) and Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001) about the making of genetically engineered crops.
Charles graduated magna cum laude from American University with a degree in economics and international affairs. After graduation Charles spent a year studying in Bonn, which was then part of West Germany, through the German Academic Exchange Service.
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Smithfield Foods says it will pay farmers to cover their manure ponds with plastic on more than 1,000 U.S. farms. Those "lagoons" have become increasingly controversial. -
The plants that nourish us won't disappear entirely. But they may have to move to higher, cooler latitudes. Some places may find it harder to grow anything at all, because there's not enough water. -
Cottonseed is full of protein but toxic to humans and most animals. The USDA has approved a genetically engineered cotton with edible seeds. They could eventually feed chickens, fish — or even people. -
Many farmers are defying efforts by regulators to strictly limit the use of dicamba, a popular weedkiller that's prone to drifting into neighboring fields. -
The EPA is deciding whether to let farmers keep using an herbicide called dicamba. The chemical is controversial because it can damage nearby crops. What's less well-known: It's hurting wildlife, too. -
At least 1.7 million chickens have died from flooding in the state. The impact is now coming into focus — including overflowing pools of hog manure and waterlogged sweet potato fields. -
Hurricane Florence is heading toward a part of North Carolina where pigs far outnumber people. Farmers and environmentalists are worried about the fate of hundreds of open-air manure lagoons. -
It involves a super solar farm the size of the United States. -
Vegetable farmers in Yuma, Ariz., are asking whether they can co-exist in the same valley with a large cattle feedlot. Those cattle are blamed for contaminating Romaine with toxic E. colibacteria. -
When a bunch of Wall Street investors sniffed out a potential price fixing scheme in the poultry business, they bet against big chicken. Then they targeted a price index published in Georgia.
