Farm Foundation has added a book award to its prestigious roster of annual awards. The Farm Foundation Book of the Year Award is open to a non-fiction English language work focused on food and/or agriculture published within the last 24 months.

“We are excited to expand the scope of the Farm Foundation Awards to honor the importance of a contemporary author exploring food or agriculture,” says Tim Brennan, Farm Foundation vice president of programs and strategic impact. “With so much exciting scholarship in these fields, we anticipate a robust pool of candidates and a difficult choice ahead.”

The book award joins the two lifetime achievement awards and two innovator awards recognizing leaders and change makers who exemplify Farm Foundation’s mission and values. They include:
–R.J. Hildreth Public Policy Award In the mid-1990s, Farm Foundation began awarding the R.J. Hildreth Award for Career Achievement in Public Policy, an award open to those in the field of public policy, through government service, as educators, or those researching agricultural policy.
–The Farm Foundation Transformational Leadership Award This lifetime achievement award honors an individual who has demonstrated innovative and transformational leadership in food and agriculture.
–The Farm Foundation Innovator of the Year Award The focus of this award is to recognize those changemakers that are an integral part of solving some of the most difficult challenges we face today in the food and agriculture sector.
–The Farm Foundation Emerging Leader Award This award recognizes a young emerging leader who is on the trajectory to make transformational change within the agriculture and food sector.

The official awards recognition ceremony will take place at the July 2025 Farm Foundation Round Table meeting in Spokane, WA. Award recipients will be invited to participate in the Round Table meeting.

The awards are open to any candidate involved in the agriculture and food sectors. For other nomination requirements and more information on each award, visit farmfoundation.org/farmfoundationawards.

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Wisconsin Watch founders Andy and Dee Hall were recently awarded the 2024 Service to Nonprofit News Award, the biggest honor from the Institute for Nonprofit News.

INN bestowed the honor last month in Atlanta at an awards ceremony co-emceed by INN board member Ron Smith, editor of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, which recently merged with Wisconsin Watch.

Wisconsin Watch state bureau chief Matthew DeFour was named a finalist for INN’s Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year Award, which honors an individual who has been in the nonprofit news field for less than two years and is contributing to the success of the person’s organization through innovation.

And environmental reporter Bennet Goldstein and managing editor Jim Malewitz were also named finalists for the Insight Award for Explanatory Journalism in the medium division for Hogtied, a three-part series examining the siting of a concentrated animal feeding operation in northern Wisconsin.

“It’s humbling to be honored by an organization and its members who have given so much to us and to our country,” Andy said in accepting the top award at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. “News that INN members provide is crucial to our democracy and our way of life. It has plugged some of the massive holes left by the for-profit business model.”

Andy, who retired last year after 15 years as executive director of Wisconsin Watch, recalled being among the founding members of INN in 2009, then known as the Investigative News Network. Roughly 30 members signed an “idealistic declaration” that its mission is “to aid and abet in every conceivable way individually and collectively the work and public reach of its member news organizations,” “to foster the highest quality investigative journalism and to hold those in power accountable at the local, national and international levels.”

Dee, previously managing editor at Wisconsin Watch and now editor-in-chief of Floodlight, a national investigative outlet reporting on climate issues, said INN has “become that and more for the burgeoning nonprofit news sector.” The organization has grown to more than 450 members.

Andy and Dee shared their predictions for the future of nonprofit news:

• The nonprofit news industry will continue to face intensified pressures from dis- and misinformation, but journalists, particularly INN members, will adapt.
• INN will play a leadership role in determining best practices.
• More newsrooms will merge.
• Newsrooms will continue to team up and share business and journalistic functions to maximize others’ returns on their investments.
• Newsroom cuts and reorganizations will continue, affecting start-ups as well as established larger news organizations.

“At their best these changes will create newsrooms that are more representative of the communities that they cover and more adept at digging into the stories that most need to be told as we rebuild the local news ecosystem all across the nation,” Andy said.

Wisconsin Watch founders honored for contributions to nonprofit news is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.