After consulting growers, researchers and chemical companies, the Missouri Agriculture Department said it will ban use of BASF's dicamba weedkiller on cotton and soybeans after June 1 in 10 southeastern counties and in the rest of the state after July 15 in order to prevent damage to neighboring crops. The state agency said it expects to issue similar limits for Monsanto and DuPont versions of the herbicide.

Mercy for Animals, a U.S.-based animal welfare group, is launching a campaign to bring awareness to the plight of fish in industrial aquaculture. The groups key concerns include “too many fish routinely crammed into pens and tanks, fish being raised in dirty water, high disease and mortality rates,” writes Clare Leschin-Hoar in FERN’s latest story with NPR’s The Salt.

Journalist and college professor Michael Pollan, author of four New York Times best sellers, says he is becoming less of a writer and more of an activist on food policy. Pollan was the star attraction for a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol to unveil an "outsider" farm bill and keynote speaker at a forum afterward to promote a fundamental overhaul of the "obsolete" policy now in place.

Five dozen scientific, farm and activists groups proposed annual increases in federal funding for agricultural research to reach $6 billion over the life of the 2018 farm bill, double the amount now allotted. The groups, "involved in almost every facet of the U.S. agricultural sector," said the two-to-one return on ag research justifies the investment when competitors such as China are taking command of the field.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have discovered a gene that creates resistance to stem-rust — a fungus that threatens wheat crops in Africa and Asia and food security worldwide.

Farm lending has stabilized in the face of low agricultural profit margins, says a quarterly Federal Reserve report on ag banks. Operating loans, to pay day-to-day expenses, have accounted for nearly 60 percent of non-real-estate loans for the past year, "the highest in the 40 year survey history," says the report of conditions nationwide.

After a pause for additional discussion, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue signed a reorganizational memorandum that puts the U.S. Codex Office under the control of USDA's chief trade officer and eliminates the Grain Inspection and Packers and Stockyards Administration as a stand-alone agency, with its duties absorbed by the much larger Agricultural Marketing Service. Both moves were protested as undue kowtowing to agribusinesses when Perdue announced them during the Labor Day lull.

With growers reporting dicamba damage to 3.1 million acres of soybeans, the harvest-time question for farmers is how much their yields will suffer from the weedkiller. University of Tennessee weed specialist Larry Steckel says the earlier that soybeans were hit in their lifecycle, the less likely yields will be reduced.

Higher commodity prices and increased demand for U.S.-grown goods fueled an 8 percent rise in farm exports to $140.5 billion in fiscal 2017, said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, two weeks ahead of the USDA's usual year-end report. As forecast in August, farm exports were the third-highest on record and ended a two-year decline.

The chief financial officer of Impossible Foods told Bloomberg that the company's veggie burger – "it looks like a burger and even bleeds like a burger," says the news agency – is being offered to food service companies. The food service sector, which includes school and corporate cafeterias, accounts for half of U.S. consumption of ground beef.

Farm operator Steve Fincher, who served three terms in the House, including time on the Agriculture Committee, said he is probably going to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker, said the Memphis Daily News. The newspaper quoted Fincher as saying, "We're very close to getting in. We're not 100 percent. But we're very close."

A study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity "suggests that living in a food swamp — a neighborhood where fast food and junk food outlets outnumber healthy alternatives — is a stronger predictor of high obesity rates" than so-called food deserts with limited access to nutritious food, says ScienceBlog.

Climate change is likely to be slightly less damaging thanks to policies in India and China that could offset the U.S.'s reduced environmental efforts under President Trump. “The Carbon Action Tracker (CAT) report, by three independent European research groups, said current policies meant the world was headed for a warming of 3.4 degrees Celsius (6.1 Fahrenheit) by 2100, down from 3.6 degrees (6.5) it predicted a year ago,” explained Reuters.

The organizer and human-rights activist, Greg Asbed, co-founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, (CIW) which has worked with major retailers and food companies to guarantee better pay and treatment for farmworkers through the coalition’s Fair Food Program. Asbed recently won one of the 24 MacArthur 'genius' grants, worth $625,000, for his leadership. As he told The New York Times in a phone interview, he plans to turn over all of that money to the coalition.

California regulators violated the Constitution by requiring warning labels on glyphosate containers saying the herbicide is a carcinogen, says a federal lawsuit filed by Monsanto and a dozen farm and agribusiness groups.

"U.S. food aid, totaling $2.4 billion a year, is a highly visible symbol of Americans' commitment to assist the downtrodden wherever they are in the world," write three analysts in an American Enterprise Institute paper that calls for sweeping reform. The paper recommends that the 2018 farm bill eliminate the requirement that half of U.S. food aid travel on U.S. ships, the "safe box" that earmarks money for local food projects and away from emergency aid, and also do away with restrictions on cash-based food aid.

Researchers have developed the first genetically modified version of a Cavendish banana that is resistant to the devastating soil-borne fungus known as Panama disease. The fungus, or Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4), can stay in the soil for 40 years and doesn’t respond to chemical sprays. It has destroyed Cavendish — the main commercial banana variety — plantations around the world, and is fast spreading across Asia.

Work by two USDA molecular biologists shows that tilapia, a commonly consumed food fish in the United States, can be selectively bred for resistance to two types of streptococcosis bacteria. Fish farmers frequently turn to antibiotics to fight diseases such as strep in farm-raised tilapia.