The USDA would be obliged to disclose the race and gender of farm subsidy recipients as well as how much money they received under companion bills filed by two Black members of the House and Senate Agriculture committees on Wednesday.

The 90-day limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults without children, enacted as part of welfare reform in 1996, failed to move people into jobs or increase their incomes after the Great Recession, said a USDA study released on Tuesday. "The findings should prove relevant as the economy recovers and states begin to re-introduce the time limit" after the pandemic, said the researchers who carried out the study.

Soybean and cotton growers in Arkansas are free to spray the weedkiller dicamba on their crops until June 30 under an order from the Arkansas Supreme Court on Tuesday. It was the latest turnabout in court for use of the herbicide, which has been embraced by farmers as a tool against invasive weeds but criticized as too likely to evaporate from its target areas and land on nearby fields.

Demand for couriers grew during the pandemic, yet their conditions only deteriorated. Lockdowns cut into their hours, leaving many workers struggling to pay bills and feed families. Eighty percent of gig workers surveyed in the summer of 2020 by the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center said they weren’t making enough to meet household expenses. A third did not have enough for groceries.<strong>(No paywall)</strong>

The Interior and Commerce departments said they will rescind or revise five Trump-era regulations that reduced federal protections for endangered and threatened species. The replacement rules would give the same protection to threatened species as endangered ones, and would instruct the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Services to disregard economic impacts when deciding whether a species should go on the endangered list.

Livestock farms and feedlots in North America may be emitting far more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than currently assumed, according to a review published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Meat processor JBS said all of its plants were fully operational on Thursday, four days after a ransomware attack shut down cattle slaughter plants in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Less than a day's worth of production was lost during the attack, the company said.

The Biden administration could "impose a significant financial burden" on farm families with its proposal for stricter application of capital gains taxes, said House Agriculture chairman David Scott on Wednesday. Scott also said any increase in estate taxes "for those taking over farmland is untenable."

Plant diseases and invasive insects take a huge toll — up to 40 percent — on global crop production, with annual losses worth nearly $300 billion. Climate change could make that worse by opening up new areas to plant pests, according to a scientific review released on Wednesday.

With cash in their wallets, farmers are joining a throng of bidders that includes investors to drive up prices for farmland, said the largest U.S. farm management and real estate company on Tuesday. "Farmland sales prices are up by 5 to 15 perent in the past six months with most of the increase coming since the first of the year," said Randy Dickhut of Farmers National Co., based in Omaha.