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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Steven Falk of Lafayette, Calif., has resigned because he says he cannot carry out policies that fail to address the urgent threat of a changing climate. -
Investigators who are trying to track down the source of E. coli in romaine lettuce have seen this movie before. They're tracking the exact strain of bacteria that caused a small outbreak a year ago. -
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. -
The Senate Judiciary Committee is moving forward with a hearing Monday on sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Also, a look at public health after the hurricane.
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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. -
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. -
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. -
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.
![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)