ByKaren Liu and Pam Dempsey/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
A 2018 recreational brand vehicle, $500,000 in cash, a quarter and a red Bass Pro Shop baseball cap. These are just a few of the thousands of items that Illinois police agencies have seized over the past decade under state and federal laws known as civil asset forfeiture. The laws allow the seizure of property without a criminal charge being filed or case being filed in court. This Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting story is part of a collaborative reporting initiative supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. See all the stories at taken.pulitzercenter.org.And they allow the police to keep and use the cash and property to finance for various expenses of the agencies, often without much oversight or disclosure on how the money is spent.
ByKaren Liu and Pam Dempsey/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Increasing lawsuits and allegations of civil right violations prompted the Illinois legislature to pass reforms of civil asset forfeitures that went into effect last year. Both federal and state civil asset forfeiture laws allow the seizure of property without a criminal charge being filed or case being filed in court. This Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting story is part of a collaborative reporting initiative supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. See all the stories at taken.pulitzercenter.org.Illinois reforms limited seizures by requiring police to have a slightly higher burden of proof to seize the property. For example, drug residue found in a person’s pocket is no longer grounds for Illinois police to take a car, said Ben Ruddell, criminal justice policy attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois in Chicago.
ByJohnathan Hettinger/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Foreign investors acquired at least 1.6 million acres of agricultural land in the United States in 2016, the largest increase in more than a decade, a Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting of the latest available federal data shows.
ByChristopher Walljasper and Ramiro Ferrando/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Farmers have been using the weed killer glyphosate – a key ingredient of the product Roundup – at soaring levels even as glyphosate has become increasingly less effective and as health concerns and lawsuits mount.
ByPam Dempsey/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Glyphosate is the most used pesticide on U.S. agricultural crops, with the nation using an estimated 287 million pounds in 2016, according to an analysis by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. And sales continue to grow, with market researchers predicting the glyphosate market to grow to $8.5 billion to $10 billion annually by 2021 up from $5 billion now. READ ALSO: Controversial Pesticide Use Increases Dramatically Across The Midwest
Of 400 pesticides used on agriculture crops across the U.S, glyphosate is used at least three times more than all others, according to an analysis of data estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The second-most used weed killer in the U.S. is atrazine – with 75.4 million pounds used on U.S. agriculture crops in 2016. In 2016, the Midwest used 65 percent of the nation’s total agriculture glyphosate use on crops.
ByChristopher Walljasper/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
After 20 years, Mississippi chicken farmer Kevin Kemp is getting out of the chicken business. He raised millions of pounds of chicken since 1996, alongside his father and brother. But Kemp said even though he’s done well as a poultry grower, raising chickens is “not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“The chicken industry has been good to a lot of people around here,” Kemp said. “It just got to the point where I didn’t enjoy raising chickens, because you had to put up with too much crap from the integrator.”
By “integrator,” Kemp means the big poultry companies, which deliver chickens to farmers as chicks, and pick them up six to eight weeks later as full-grown birds, ready to be slaughtered and sent to restaurants and grocery stores. Kemp has experienced the immense control poultry companies put on growers – how they care for the birds, the way payments are determined, even dictating when growers replace equipment.
ByChristopher Walljasper/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
When nearly 300 Americans submitted comments this summer on the USDA’s pilot plan to bring high speed broadband internet to rural America, they mentioned the great opportunities reliable internet connectivity could bring. But they also voiced skepticism over the agency’s proposed plans for the project, which has been in the works for nearly a year.
ByChristopher Walljasper/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
America has lost millions of acres of farmland over the nearly three decades to urban and rural development. Despite conservation efforts by state and local governments and increased financial incentives for farmers, urban development and the expansion of rural residential real estate over the last 25 years has eliminated farmland across the country at levels not seen since the early 1970s.
ByChristopher Walljasper/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Driving along Route 47 in Kane County, Illinois, corn and soybean fields are dotted with signs advertising the amenities of burgeoning communities. For more than 20 years, Kane County has been a poster child for urban sprawl, the spreading of development of land on the edge of a metropolitan area.