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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Grass on the prairie is growing taller because there's now more carbon dioxide in the air. Paradoxically, though, this might be hurting wildlife, because the grass is less nutritious. -
The Internet startup Tillable wants to match farmers with farmland available for rent. The problem? Farmers already on that land fear their farm data is being used against them. -
A jury ordered two big agricultural companies to pay a peach farmer in Missouri $265 million in damages. At issue is an herbicide that is known to drift from where it's sprayed.
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Researchers in Israel have grown date palm trees from ancient seeds found at the same site as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those trees might soon produce fruit, re-creating the taste of antiquity. -
Across the Midwest, millions of acres of farmland have been damaged by dicamba, an herbicide that can harm crops not engineered to withstand it. There are so many cases, regulators can't keep up. -
Farmers got more than $22 billion in government payments in 2019 — and most of the money came through a program that Congress never approved. It's the highest level of farm subsidies in 14 years. -
America's supply of sugar is shrinking because of a poor sugar beet harvest in the northern Midwest. As a result, the U.S. will import more sugar this fiscal year than it has in almost 40 years. -
In the search for alternatives to coal and gas, some European countries have turned to a very old fuel. They're importing wood from the United States. Some environmentalists say it makes no sense. -
Two large companies plan to capture natural gas from manure-filled ponds, turning it into clean, climate-saving energy. But some neighbors just want the ponds gone. -
Researchers are worried that the lithium ion batteries powering our phones, and soon our cars, will turn into a big waste problem. They're trying to figure out how to recycle them.
