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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On a growing number of dairy farms, cows, not people, decide when they need to be milked. Robots can do the job day or night. For some farm families, the robots free them from rigid milking schedules. -
Strawberry growers are so worried about the farmworker shortage that they're testing a strawberry-picking robot. But while picking strawberries is easy for humans, machines struggle with the task. -
In Arkansas, a regulatory committee of farmers and small-business owners banned the latest weed-killing technology from the giant agrichemical company. Monsanto is taking them to court. -
The proposed changes to food stamps, now called SNAP, would be drastic: About half the benefits would be boxed-up, nonperishable foods. Recipients would lose a lot of their ability to pick their food. -
Microorganisms play a vital role in growing food and sustaining the planet, but they do it anonymously. Scientists haven't identified most soil microbes, but they are learning which are most common.
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For the first time in history, soybeans are about to become America's most widely grown crop. Yet compared to corn or wheat, they remain curiously invisible in American culture. -
Scientists are accusing the seed and pesticide giant of denying the risks of its latest weedkilling technology. Monsanto has responded by attacking some of those critics. -
![Wade Dooley, in Albion, Iowa, uses less fertilizer than most farmers because he grows rye and alfalfa, along with corn and soybeans. "This field [of rye] has not been fertilized at all," he says.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/0e6e84d/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1841x1026+0+177/resize/280x156!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2017%2F08%2F22%2Fimg_0086-4ad8a5270bcf6a8a5fac7f27a9d172a44a1558b9.jpg)
Big food companies like Walmart want farmers to reduce greenhouse emissions from nitrogen fertilizer. But the best-known program to accomplish this may not be having much effect. -
A new study is adding to evidence that a popular class of pesticides can harm wild bees, like bumblebees. -
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.
![Wade Dooley, in Albion, Iowa, uses less fertilizer than most farmers because he grows rye and alfalfa, along with corn and soybeans. "This field [of rye] has not been fertilized at all," he says.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/0197a00/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1841x1026+0+177/resize/560x312!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2017%2F08%2F22%2Fimg_0086-4ad8a5270bcf6a8a5fac7f27a9d172a44a1558b9.jpg)
