With a shortage of farmworker labor and growing concerns about food safety, one of the largest produce companies in the Salinas Valley of California is turning to mechanized harvesting and robotic processing of its vegetables, forever replacing the workers who once performed these jobs, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Wild bumblebee queens exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides were 26 percent less likely to lay eggs than unexposed queens, says a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

As he works to reverse many of the environmental regulations set under the Obama administration, EPA chief Scott Pruitt has dialed up both security and secrecy at the agency.

With temperatures approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit hotter than the average temperature from 1981 to 2010, 2016 was the hottest year on record, according to a report published by the American Meteorological Society. Last year was the third year in a row for record heat in the U.S.

SNAP Maps, a new interactive tool from the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), shows that, over a five-year period, "an average of 16% of rural and small-town households participated in SNAP, compared to 13% of households in metro areas," says Feedstuffs. 

A group representing farmers in Washington State and Oregon is urging the Interior Department to convene the “God squad” — an interagency committee empowered to override the Endangered Species Act — over complaints that the act's protections on salmon are hurting growers and others.

As the Trump administration spars with North Korea with threats of nuclear attacks, Americans are turning to so-called prepper businesses to stock up on food, water, and other supplies, reports The New York Times. 

Although corn and soybean prices are lower than a year ago, farmland values in the Midwest are up by 1 percent compared to this point a year ago, the first year-over-year gain in three years, said the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. But land values fell in the central Plains, according to ag bankers surveyed by the Kansas City Fed.

In its first estimate of the fall harvest, the USDA said farmers will harvest a record soybean crop for the fourth consecutive year, fattening a large global stockpile. The government forecast of the corn crop also was larger than expected, with USDA saying this year's crop would sell for the lowest price per bushel in 11 years because of ample supplies.

The White House nominee for USDA chief scientist, Sam Clovis, described President Obama as an aspiring dictator and climate change as a con job during a broadcast career in Iowa a few years ago, said CNN's KFile. The USDA had no immediate response. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said an earlier CNN report on Clovis' political views was part of a smear campaign against Trump nominees.

Farmers voted overwhelmingly for President Trump last fall and they are ardent supporters to this day, according to a Farm Futures survey of 1,200 growers, as the president completed his sixth month in office. Some 49 percent gave Trump an "A" or a "B" grade on agriculture; only 10 percent, roughly the same portion who supported Democrat Hillary Clinton, gave him an "F."

Russian farmers are headed for a record-setting wheat harvest, forecast the USDA, up 7 percent from 2016 thanks to high yields in the winter wheat crop and a bountiful outlook for spring-planted wheat. With the large crop, Russia is forecast to displace the United States as the world's largest wheat exporter.

Dozens of internal emails "reveal how Monsanto worked with an outside consulting firm to induce" a scientific journal "to publish a purported 'independent' review of Roundup's health effects that appears to be anything but," says Bloomberg Businessweek. The review, published as a supplement by Critical Reviews in Toxicology, rebutted the conclusion by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller, is probably carcinogenic to humans.

After shutting down row-crop use of dicamba for the rest of this growing season, Arkansas has appointed a 21-member task force to look for a long-term solution to the nearly 900 complaints about the herbicide this year. "The task force will attempt to reach consensus on a set of recommendations for the use of dicamba products n Arkansas as quickly as possible in order to provide certainty for the 2018 growing season," said the state Agriculture Department.

The EPA will provide clarity to the reach of the clean water law with its revisions of the so-called Waters of the United States that was proposed by the Obama administration and blocked by court challenges, said administrator Scott Pruitt in a Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette interview. Pruitt said the new rule would be “objectively measured and traditional in its view of how we should measure waters of the United States.”

Poor children growing up in three out of four rural counties — especially in the Great Plains — are more likely to earn more than the national average by the age of 26 than their counterparts in cities, says a national study by Stanford economist Raj Chetty. Just 29 percent of kids in densely populated urban centers earn more than the national average as adults.