Beef photo courtesy Shutterstock.

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The Kansas City Star recently published the results of a year-long investigation into “big beef,” the four industrial-sized beef-butchering corporations. The special series drew on the reporting and research strengths of several local groups, including Harvest Public Media and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.  

On a recent segment of KCUR-FM’s Up to Date, Kansas City Star reporter Mike McGraw, and Harvest Public Media’s Peggy Lowe and Jeremy Bernfeld, discussed the impact of big beef operations on food safety and the environment, as well as the influence of corporations at agricultural colleges.

Some legal and corporate financial research for the series was conducted by the UMKC School of Law’s Leon E. Bloch Law Library, its director Paul Callister, government documents librarian Cynthia Ernst, and UMKC law student Heather Beer.  Harvest Public Media is a Local Journalism Center focused on agricultural issues, launched in 2010 with the support of a two-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The center includes multiple public radio stations in the Midwest and is headquartered at KCUR.

KCUR-FM is a service of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.