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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The poultry industry may be on the verge of adopting ambitious new animal-welfare standards, giving chickens more space and daylight, and even returning to older, slower-growing chicken breeds. -
Whole Foods has been forced to stop selling goat cheese made from milk that came from a prison farm, where inmates work for less than a dollar an hour. Yet the inmates themselves aren't complaining. -
As many as 2 million acres of soybeans may have been harmed by a popular weedkiller drifting into neighboring fields. Arkansas' proposed ban on the herbicide, dicamba, is awaiting final approval. -
A huge new study conducted in 33 sites across Europe finds that seeds coated with neonicotinoid pesticides harm bees living nearby. The damage, though, depends on local conditions. -
A weedkiller called dicamba, which farmers hoped could banish herbicide-resistant weeds, has become a plague itself in Arkansas. The state's regulators just voted to ban it for 120 days. -
There's a global shortage of vanilla beans because big food companies now want natural vanilla, rather than the synthetic kind. Prices have soared, squeezing bakers and ice cream makers alike. -
Right now, the government rents farmland to help protect soil and water. But once the land is farmed again, the benefits disappear. Environmentalists want to change that.
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Journalist Chris Clayton writes for an audience filled with climate skeptics: farmers and leaders of agricultural businesses. He's telling them that a changing climate will disrupt their lives. -
The apple renaissance of recent years has given us new varieties of fruit. But that's only half of the story, and half of the tree. Another revolution is happening below ground, in the tree roots. -
Two scientists agree that pesticide-laden dust from planting equipment kills bees. But they're proposing different solutions, because they disagree about whether the pesticides are useful to farmers.
