Climate
Choice Cuts: Ready For a Cricket Taco?
This is the fifth and final part of Harvest Public Media’s week-long series Choice Cuts: Meat In America, examining how the meat industry is changing the U.S. food system and the American diet. The documentary on the subject, which aired Thursday on KCPT, will re-air Sunday at 9am and Monday at 10pm on KCPT. Beef, poultry and pork are staples of the American diet,…
Choice Cuts: Massive corn crops form backbone of meat industry
This is part two of Harvest Public Media’s week-long series Choice Cuts: Meat In America, examining how the meat industry is changing the U.S. food system and the American diet. The documentary on the subject will air 7:30 pm this Thursday on KCPT. Drive down a dirt road, a two-lane country highway, even many Interstates in the Midwest and the view…
Take 5 for your health
High Teen Birth Rates In Rural Kansas Pose Obstacles To Economic Advancement Nineteen-year-old Claudia Rivera shares a single-story tract home in Liberal, Kansas, with her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jesùs Varela. Last month, Varela’s mother moved in so she could watch Rivera’s baby boy, Fabian, while Rivera works at the Dollar General store and Valera pulls down a shift at…
High water changes Platte River landscape
Wet spring and summer rains soaked much of the High Plains this year. The Platte River, which runs through Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri River, saw historic flooding. Standing on the bank of the Platte River at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary near Gibbon, Neb., conservation director Andrew Pierson points upstream to where…
Sounding Smart
INTERNATIONAL Russia moved forcefully into Syria. Many of the targets seem to be non-IS opponents of Russia’s ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. So that’s not terribly helpful. India announced a new plan to lower its rate of greenhouse gas emissions. The plan includes an aggressive adoption of renewable energies, such as wind and solar, but the nation nevertheless remains highly…
Take 5 for your health
From Heroin To Hollywood: Kansas Native Shares Story Of Addiction And Recovery Los Angeles-based actor David Dastmalchian returned to Kansas with a message he said should transcend politics: We can’t give up on people who struggle with substance abuse and mental illness. Dastmalchian is now a budding Hollywood star, with roles in blockbusters like 2008’s…
Rockers record 'Love Song' for the third rock from the sun
Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow and Fergie have joined forces to record a song about climate change. Sean Paul, Leona Lewis and Colbie Caillat also appear on “Love Song to the Earth,” which was released Friday on iTunes and Apple Music via Connect. Proceeds from the track will benefit the United Nations Foundation…
Upside Down-Land: Cerner's TIF Transplant
Neal Patterson personifies 21st-century Kansas City entrepreneurialism. He is his generation’s Henry Bloch or Joyce Hall, the head of a company he started from nothing — Cerner Corporation — and made KC’s most prosperous business. Cerner, a health-information technology firm, makes more than $3 billion a year. The company’s market capitalization — the value of…
Monsanto, world’s largest seed company, sets off a corporate ‘feeding frenzy’
Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, is attempting to swallow up the chemical operations of Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of pesticides and other farm inputs. The proposed deal signals a change in focus for the agricultural giant, and could have ripple effects across farm country. By its own admission, Monsanto lags behind in chemistry…
When it rains, it pours – how storms are affecting this year’s crops
Driving down a two-lane highway in rural Missouri, Matt Plenge squinted at a patch of gray clouds hanging low over his farm fields in the distance. “Does it look hazy up there?” he asked. “We only had a 20 percent chance today. We shouldn’t get any rain.” Plenge, like most farmers, always keeps one eye…