Weekly newsletter: October 08, 2025

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The Desk: By the Numbers

We're looking back at our story counts this year and since the Desk launched in 2022.

(Graphics: Grace Noble/Ag & Water Desk)

Hi ,

Here at the Ag & Water Desk, our fiscal year starts in July. This means our staff spent the last few weeks crunching numbers and compiling reports for our generous funders that support this important work across the Basin. 

This week, we're excited to share some of those numbers with you.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, the Ag & Water Desk covers the nation’s largest watershed as an interconnected ecosystem, with journalists stationed at 15 local news outlets and counting. These reporters and other contributors work with our staff to produce multimedia coverage of agriculture, water, climate, energy, and other topics, which is shared with newsrooms to republish for free. (Newsrooms: sign up for that list here.)

From July 2024 to July 2025, our journalists produced more than 1,141 local stories and approximately 72 collaborative stories and projects on regional environmental topics. 

This brings the Ag & Water Desk’s total body of work since we started publishing in 2022 to more than 2,200 local stories and 190 collaborative pieces. 

We're incredibly proud to provide this nuanced, fact-based environmental reporting to communities that would otherwise go without. 

Collaborative Desk stories done in conjuction with our staff are data-driven, investigative, or regional in nature. Here are just a few examples of our work in the past year. You can explore our full backlog of stories here.

Desk reporters also cover their local communities, covering everything from farmers to flooding. This is important, as study after study shows that people tend to trust local media outlets more than national ones.  

Here are a few local stories of note:

We're thankful to be able to work on a project that has the massive scale of the Ag & Water Desk, especially in a time of shrinking editorial budgets and growing news deserts.

If you can support this reporting, please donate to the project here. Thanks for joining us on this journey. More next week from across the Basin.

The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Click here for a map of the basin and our partner newsrooms.

Reach us at info@agwaterdesk.org or by replying to this email. 

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