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A tractor falls on you. A horse kicks you. A cow pins you against the side of a barn. Your hand gets caught in a corn shucker.
These are just some of the accidents Michigan State University researcher Laurel Morano documented in her recent study of agriculture-related injuries – and only among the most dramatic examples of the dangers farmers face every day on the job.
Jane Elder once escorted a live cormorant to a Congressional hearing.
Elder, then a Sierra Club lobbyist, and James Ludwig, a Great Lakes ecologist, in 1989 drove the bird named Cosmos from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Washington D.C.
Steve Hall used to call public health “the invisible profession.”
“Previously, when we did our jobs well, people didn’t know about us,” said Hall, who for 10 years has been the health officer for the Central Michigan District Health Department.
When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed off on expansive recycling reforms in December 2022, she also approved a last-minute amendment allowing chemical recycling — a process decried by many environmentalists — to be classified as a legal manufacturing process.
Chemical recycling, specifically the commonly used plastic pyrolysis process, turns plastic into fuel.
The number of farmhands in Michigan working on H-2A visas — which allow farms that are struggling to hire U.S. workers to bring in temporary laborers from other countries—increased from 277 in 2010 to over 15,000 in 2023, according to the Michigan Farm Bureau.
Every fish studied recently in two southeast Michigan watersheds contained at least one of a family of toxic and persistent health-threatening chemicals.
The chemicals – collectively known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS – are found in some rivers, lakes, soils, drinking water, fish, cattle and crops.
Less than two miles past the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are dozens of cedars stripped of their bark and left to die.
“It is probably the most obscene thing I’ve witnessed,” said Renee Dillard, an elder of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians who recently discovered the damaged trees.
The lack of ice on the Great Lakes could cause thunderstorms and tornadoes to occur earlier than usual in the region.
Michigan is expected to see more severe weather in April and May, said Paul Pastelok, a meteorologist for AccuWeather.
Sitting at 26 miles long and 24 miles wide with nearly one-third of the sport fishing catch annually in the Great Lakes region, Lake St. Clair should be a household name.
Author Daniel Harrison would tell you it’s his hidden jewel.
Precision agriculture technology has been evolving over the past decades, and farming has become more productive and efficient with the further implementation of artificial intelligence.
A 2023 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found only 27% of farms and ranches nationally used such precision agriculture practices, but the rate was around 40% in Michigan.