John Deere’s $305 million purchase of Blue River Technology, “a startup that makes robots capable of identifying unwanted plants, and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide,” is yet another indication of the “growing appetite for high tech in agriculture,” says Wired.

Building on a controversial USDA reorganization rolled out in May, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced further steps to realign “a number of offices within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in order to improve customer service and maximize efficiency.”

Monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains are facing extinction, as the number wintering in California has plummeted by more than 90 percent since 1980, says a study published by the journal Biological Conservation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is debating whether to grant endangered species status to the insect.

Former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said President Trump’s nominee to head the USDA’s research division wouldn’t be a credible choice with the scientific community, according to Harvest Public Media. Trump nominated former conservative talk radio host and economics professor Sam Clovis to be the USDA’s chief scientist in July, setting off a wave of criticism.

Even as Alaska experienced a banner year for sockeye salmon, some commercial fishermen had to stop hauling in the fish because there weren’t enough workers to process them.

After 44 years as president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Michael Jacobson is stepping down. During his long tenure, Jacobson not only helped develop nutrition labels, he “has also had a hand in halting the marketing of many sugar-filled foods to children, reducing salt levels in packaged foods, and banning transfats,” says NPR.

President Trump’s decision to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is unlikely to have a major impact on the nation’s agricultural workforce, says Capital Press, quoting an immigration attorney who estimates that “only 5 to 10 percent of the 800,000 people benefiting from DACA ... work in agriculture.”

As state and federal efforts to upgrade the civic infrastructure have faltered, the private and nonprofit sectors see an opportunity to provide "time-saving hacks" for recipients of food stamps and other public services, reports Wired. "There is an endless variety of apps designed to manage life for the upper middle class, but low-income Americans—a group that spends a disproportionate amount of its budget on basic necessities—don’t benefit from the same time-saving hacks," says Wired. "With a user base of nearly 43 million Americans, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food stamps, is ripe for innovation."

Not only are tiny plastic particles showing up in the fish we eat, but they’re in nearly all the tap water we drink, says an investigation by Orb Media. The research examined samples from around the world, and 83 percent of them contained microplastics.

The U.S. pork industry is spending billions of dollars to build five new plants and expanding another existing plant in the Midwest. But that investment will pale in comparison to the money needed to supply those packing plants with pigs, according to Successful Farming. The five new plants alone will be capable of processing at least 40,000 hogs a day.

Six indigenous farmers were brutally killed in Peru by land traffickers trying to make way for a palm oil plantation, adding to the more than 120 environmental and land defenders who have been murdered around the world in 2017 alone.

An estimated 12.3 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2016, essentially unchanged from 12.7 percent in 2015, the USDA Economic Research Service said. But the figures still mean that more than 41 million Americans, or 15.6 million households, don’t get enough food.

To boost food production, China has spread polyethylene film across 49 million acres — 12 percent of the country’s total farmland — despite warnings that the synthetic mulch is toxic and degrades the soil.

In the wake of this summer’s widespread damage to soybeans and other crops caused by the unintended drift from applications of the weedkiller dicamba, Reuters reports that EPA regulators told state officials that they are considering a ban on use of the herbicide after a cutoff date early next year. The idea would be to limit spraying to early spring, before soybeans emerge from the ground.  

Consumers are beginning to recognize the huge environmental costs of palm oil use in the packaged foods industry, but what’s less known is how widely the ingredient is used in everyday products sold by the personal care industry. In FERN’s latest story, “The Makeover,” Jocelyn Zuckerman reports on this industry and its attempts to reform its supply chain in a story produced with Vogue Magazine. (No paywall)

A first-of-its-kind study lays out, on a county-by-county basis, the environmental impact of growing corn in the United States, offering the industry an unprecedented tool for improving sustainability along its supply chain.

For Texas cotton farmers, 2017 was shaping up to be the best harvest in more than a decade, according to NBC News. But then Hurricane Harvey hit and turned their prospects upside down. The turn of events was painful, given that in 2016 “farmers were lucky to harvest one bale of cotton per acre of the profitable crop.” This year, they had been expecting yields of three or four bales per acre.

President Trump’s decision to end DACA, the Obama-era program that gave work permits to children of undocumented immigrants, is likely to touch off a “civil war” over immigration among congressional Republicans, reports DTN. Trump urged Congress to replace the program with legislation before it expires next March.

A wealthy Italian family plans to pump groundwater out of rural New Mexico to supply 155,000 households in sprawling Albuquerque, 140 miles away. Local ranchers have criticized the plan, fearing that the $600 million project will deplete the ancient aquifer they depend on for their cattle and families.

Many Americans know that honeybees are threatened by colony collapse disorder, but few of them realize just how many different kinds of bees there are, says a study published in the online edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.