Iowa State Sen. David Johnson this week introduced a suite of 15 bills that would together increase oversight of animal confinement operations in the state. Johnson is calling for a moratorium on building or expanding concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, until the state’s water quality improves, reports the Des Moines Register.

The chairmen of the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees unveiled a broad-scale immigration reform bill that might piggyback on a legislative resolution of the “dreamers” issue.

A bill in the Colorado legislature would require that raw beef sold in the state be identified as either “USA Beef” or “Imported Beef,” says Drovers. The bill’s House sponsor says it would boost cattle prices in Colorado.

Plants that grow well often fare poorly in heat or drought, while those that seem to shrug off hot or dry weather often grow slowly; neither type is ideal for crops. Now a Purdue plant scientist “has found the switch that creates that antagonism, opening opportunities to develop plants that exhibit both characteristics,” said the university.

Declaring that closing the digital divide is the FCC’s top priority, chairman Ajit Pai proposed an agency order to put $500 million in funding toward high-speed internet in rural America, said ZDNet.

Snowpack in parts of the Rocky Mountains is at record lows because of warmer than usual weather, “raising concerns about water supplies and economic damage,” says Inside Climate News.

The United States rebounded to its longtime spot as the world’s largest wheat exporter last year, but Russia will be No. 1 by a long shot in the 2017/18 marketing year, says the monthly Grain: World Markets and Trade report.

Two grocers last week filed a price-fixing lawsuit against the country’s top poultry processors. The suit alleges that the processors, including Tyson Foods, Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue Farms, have conspired to fix the price of broiler chickens over the course of several decades.

German researchers report that lithium chloride “is highly effective” in killing Varroa mites, a parasite commonly listed as one of the major reasons for high mortality among the pollinating insects.

Former two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty says he will not run for the Senate this year, “dashing Republican hopes that he would mount a strong bid for Al Franken’s old seat,” said the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

On one of the last days before USDA can carry out its plan to kill the organic livestock rule, the organic food movement put a full-page ad in the Washington Post, asking Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to drop the idea. The USDA announced in mid-December that it lacked statutory authority to implement the rule, which was a decade in the making, and set a 30-day comment period before it would withdraw the regulation.

The little-known U.S. Judicial Panel on Mulitdistrict Litigation is scheduled to hear arguments on Jan. 25 in Miami on one of the hottest issues in agriculture — claims of crop damage due to the weedkiller dicamba, said the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The panel will decide whether to centralize more than a dozen lawsuits filed in four states against the makers of dicamba, which would mean one court would oversee the cases.

In a USDA survey, growers indicated that they planted 32.6 million acres of winter wheat for harvest this spring, the smallest area since 1909 although not as small as expected by analysts. The decline in winter wheat, the dominant wheat grown in the United States, is part of a long-running shift to corn and soybeans that is projected to result in the smallest all-wheat plantings in the country since recordkeeping began.

Two major agribusiness groups are scrambling to fix a flaw in the new tax law that offers a big tax deduction to farmers who sell their crops through cooperatives but not when they deal with privately owned merchants. The flaw was created when lawmakers tried to replicate the benefits to farmes from a provision of the old tax code, known as Section 199, that was eliminated by the new law.

Whether growers operate indoors or out, vegetable production "seems to be on the rise in the Arctic," says Arctic Now, a news partnership based around the polar north. "Greenhouses and hydroponic systems are beacons of hope for the improvement of food security and health issues, and a diversification of the economy in remote Arctic communities."

Hog giant Smithfield Foods has launched a program to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2025, but it is doing so largely by focusing on the fertilizer applications of its grain farmers. While that’s an important step, it also sidesteps the biggest source of the company’s emissions — its 19 million hogs, FERN’s latest story, in partnership with The WorldPost, reported. (No paywall)

Some 30 tribes are members of the newly formed Native Farm Bill Coalition, whose goal is influencing the 2018 farm bill, particularly on rural economic development issues, says Minnesota Public Radio.