Flatwater Free PressYanqi Xu (pronounced yen-chee shu) most recently covered courts and law for NC Policy Watch in North Carolina, focusing on criminal justice reform, housing justice, voting rights and redistricting. Prior to that, she was part of a team at the Investigative Reporting Workshop that developed the Public Accountability Project, a newsroom search tool that hosts more than 1 billion public records in one place. She hails from China, where she first developed an interest in telling stories that resonate with people, no matter where they are.
Monitoring wells at 16 Pillen family-tied operations have tested for nitrate levels far above legal drinking water limit. One was so high, an expert said, “it should be a 911.”
Kerry Knuth steers his sprayer across a field, occasionally craning his neck to watch his newest piece of equipment shoot fertilizer at the base of his growing corn.…
Board attendance spiked in spring 2022, after a Flatwater Free Press story showing spotty attendance. It spiked again this year, after the Nebraska Legislature got involved.
Last summer, Imperial farmer Dirk Haarberg made the hard decision to let some of his milo crop die. The heat and the wind had proven too much, Haarberg…
HASTINGS–Marty Stange kept adding the worrisome maps to a file folder on his desk. Hastings’ veteran environmental supervisor gathered the maps from a 200-square-mile area surrounding the city,…
Marty Stange was grasping for solutions to keep 25,000 residents safe – and a city’s budget from breaking. It was 2015. Multiple wells providing water to the central…
There are few staff to monitor Nebraska’s vast swaths of farmland, thousands of cattle feedlots, large hog operations and chicken farms. And the agencies’ own regulations don’t give the staff many tools to combat malpractice.
Recent studies have found that areas with elevated nitrate levels also have elevated levels of lymphoma, leukemia and brain cancers in children.
Nebraska’s nitrate level has doubled in the past four decades. Despite this, state and local governments have taken little action to regulate the farming practices that lead to nitrate seeping into our drinking water.
Kim Young knows what it is like to travel hundreds of miles to have an abortion in a state she doesn’t call home. Told no Planned Parenthood doctor…