After a controversial four-month review of 27 U.S. national monuments, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke won’t recommend that the White House do away with any of them. He did say, however, that “a handful of sites” could see their boundaries changed or shrunken, says the Associated Press.

With winds of 105 mph early today, Hurricane Harvey could be the most powerful storm to hit the United States since 2005, bringing 15 to 25 inches of rain to the Texas coast and up to 15 inches of rain to central Louisiana, said the National Weather Service, as growers scurried to harvest cotton and rice ahead of the storm.

Although the world will harvest the third-largest grain crop ever in 2017/18 — only 4 percent smaller than the record set last season — the global grain inventory will decline for the first time in five years, forecasts the International Grains Council.

Meat is significantly more affordable in America than it is in Europe, where prices are, on average, twice as high, and Asia, where many people can barely afford to buy it at all, says the 2017 meat-price index, released by Caterwings, a UK-based business-to-business catering service.

An international team of researchers has mapped the “jumping genes,” formally named transposable elements, or transposons, in corn, says UC-Davis. “The discovery could ultimately benefit the breeding and production of maize, one of the world’s most important crops.”

First-term Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, “has a strong personal brand and Republicans do not yet have a clear challenger,” says the political tip sheet Sabato’s Crystal Ball in previewing the 2018 Senate race in North Dakota. “We’re giving her a boost to ‘Leans Democratic.’ ”

Memphis Meats, a San Francisco Bay–area company that is developing technology to grow meat from self-reproducing cells, raised $17 million in funding from investors that included Cargill, one of the largest U.S. meatpackers. “Cargill’s investment is the first by a traditional meat company in to the ‘clean meat’ sector,” said Drovers CattleNetwork.

Amazon can proceed with its purchase of Whole Foods after getting the green light from the Federal Trade Commission, which determined that the deal will not reduce competition in the grocery sector. The FTC announced its decision hours after Whole Foods’ stockholders approved the $13.7 billion transaction, said CNBC.

President Trump’s new threat to terminate NAFTA, made during a rally in Phoenix, is a negotiating tactic rather than a serious possibility, said Canadian and Mexican officials. “This was always a card we knew the president would likely play . . . it may have been a bit earlier than expected,” a Canadian official told Reuters.

Facing a proposed budget cut, an Interior Department agency told the National Academy of Sciences to stop work on a study into the health risks faced by Appalachian residents who live near mountaintop removal coal-mining sites, said the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette-Mail.

The USDA is opening a 60-day comment period on potential updates to the license requirements for people who breed, sell, or exhibit animals for commercial purposes. At the same time, the Humane Society of the United States says the USDA’s new “search tool” for accessing animal-abuse records “is still virtually unusable.”

A new bill in California aims to better support the state’s minority and female farmers. The Farmer Equity Act of 2017 “applies to producers that have been federally classified as ‘socially disadvantaged,’ which includes people in groups whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice,” says Civil Eats.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is reviewing catch limits for 11 Alaskan native communities permitted to catch bowhead whales for subsistence hunting. The new quota would cover a six-year period starting in 2018.

Researchers at the University of Southern California are in the early stages of an experiment to farm seaweed for biofuel in the Pacific Ocean. Kelp can grow two to three feet a day without fertilizer, pesticides, fresh water, or arable land — making it an ideal product for the biofuel industry.

A federal jury in Las Vegas delivered not guilty verdicts today to four gunmen involved in the 2014 standoff led by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. “U.S. prosecutors said the four defendants had committed crimes including conspiracy, assault on a federal officer, extortion, and weapons law violations,” said Reuters.