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As dawn broke over the Loop, Annette Prince patrolled the streets armed with a lime green net, racing to collect four colorful birds lying dead under glass skyscrapers before seagulls could snatch them up.

It’s like an Easter egg hunt, she said — just not the fun kind.

Every morning during the spring migration season of March to June, Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, leads hundreds of volunteers who scour downtown Chicago searching for migratory birds that have collided w...

Harold Wilken still remembers the moment nearly 30 years ago when he was sprayed with herbicides after a hose broke on his family farm in Danforth, Illinois.

A decade later, Wilken was diagnosed with cancer. He said he believes years of herbicide exposure contributed to his health problems, including tonsil and lymph node cancer.

“I’m done with this,” Wilken said of herbicides.
Today, Wilken grows 4,000 acres of grain, rye, corn and soybeans in central Illinois with his son — without the use of...

From sunrise to well past sundown, Rodney Bushmeyer has been driving his tractor over freshly turned soil on his western Illinois farm, planting soybean seeds. He has covered nearly 800 acres. But with another 2,200 acres to go, spring planting season is far from over.

Bushmeyer has been cultivating fields in Hull for over 50 years, growing corn, soybeans and wheat on land that’s been farmed by his father and grandfather before him. Like many other Illinois farmers, Bushmeyer had already applied nitrogen fertilizer to the ground last fall to prepare corn crops for planting.

But as the Iran war enters its fifth week and fertilizer prices surge, he’s not sure he will be able to afford additional applications that could boost his crop production.

“We’ll put some fertilizer on after the crop comes up,” Bushmeyer said. “But if the price stays where it is now, we may not. We may need to sacrifice yield for it, but it’s a balancing act.”