A federal judge in Las Vegas said Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff with the government over cattle grazing, can be released on bond from jail during his trial on weapons and conspiracy charges.

Nearly two decades after it agreed that consumption of soy protein reduced the risk of heart disease, the FDA proposed revocation of the so-called health claim because of new research that questions the relationship. It would be the first time the agency revoked any of the 12 health claims authorized since 1990.

Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, sponsor of a bill that would give legal status to undocumented farmworkers and their families, says he will retire after 13 terms in the House.

Eight months after he was elected president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, David Schemm resigned to pursue, in NAWG's words, "other professional opportunities in his home state of Kansas." The High Plains Journal said Schemm "has reportedly been tapped to accept the position of Kansas Farm Service Agency executive director," but there was no official word.

Research by the University of Saskatchewan provides “the first direct evidence that neonicotinoids can harm songbirds and their migration,” said the Guardian, by causing the birds to lose weight and their sense of direction.

McDonald’s will now require chicken suppliers, including Tyson and Cargill, to treat animals more humanely at slaughter. “Birds sold to the chain ... no longer will be shocked, shackled by the feet to conveyors and have their throats slit ...,” says The Los Angeles Times. “Such methods can leave chickens fully conscious when they are slaughtered.”

In a Federal Register notice today, the USDA announced it will extend its “three flexibilities” for school menus — salt, whole grains, and flavored milk — into the 2018/19 school year. It will also invite comment on the “long-term availability of the flexibilities,” which Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue introduced at an elementary school on his sixth day in office.

Research by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that "about 1 in 5 adults engage in body-specific self-loathing behavior," says the Danbury (Conn.) News Times. "It’s even more more common among adults who are obese, with 52 percent of them admitting to internalizing their weight bias."

Farms in Puerto Rico are used in the research and development of up to 85 percent of the corn, soybean, and other hybrid seeds grown in the United States. “So the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in September stretches to the croplands of the Midwest and Great Plains,” reports Harvest Public Media.

With industrial tequila farms switching to cloned agave plants, the bats that pollinate them are disappearing. “You can't have tequila without agave, the spiky desert plant used as its base,” says NPR. “And it's hard to have agave without bats — because a few species of these winged creatures are the plant's primary pollinators. Agave co-evolved with bats over thousands of years. As a result, it's one of the very few plants that pollinates at night.”

A simulation by Texas A&M scientists indicates that winter wheat is a feasible cover crop for cotton growers in the arid Plains, says one of the researchers.

To assure a "truly local pint," a trade group for small and independent brewers announced an agreement with USDA's Agricultural Research Service to fund the breeding of a disease-resistant hop cultivar that will be freely available. The trade group Brewers Association says the goal is to ensure "all growers have access to high quality, disease-resistant cultivars they need to sustain production at levels required by brewers."

The lead Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to interview the USDA’s Sam Clovis, a co-chair of the Trump presidential campaign, about proposals that Trump representatives meet Russian government officials during the 2016 campaign.

Hog farmers are sending more hogs to market this year, which ordinarily would pull down pork prices in the supermarket. That's not the case this year, according to USDA economists, because consumer demand for bacon is bolstering pork prices overall.

The reason Americans rarely take timber jobs in public forests isn’t because they don’t like to work hard. It’s because a combination of immigration laws, tight federal budgets and divisive politics have turned forestry jobs into little more than low-paid servitude, writes Hal Herring in FERN’s story [LINK] with High Country News.

Iowa is best known as the top corn-producing state in the nation, but a small and determined group of farmers is trying to chip away at that reputation by bringing back small grains like rye, oats, and triticale, Twilight Greenaway reports in FERN’s latest story, published in collaboration with Yale Environment 360.