Even as human carbon emissions have stabilized in the past few years, researchers are seeing an increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists are worried that the Earth’s carbon “sponges,” including its forests and oceans, aren’t capturing the gas as efficiently as they once did.

In less than two weeks, California will list glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, to its list of known carcinogens, said the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The listing was delayed while Monsanto challenged the decision in court.

The Prince Edward Island environment minister approved a proposal by AquaBounty, the developer of a genetically engineered salmon, to produce 250 tonnes a year of the fish at Rollo Bay West, on the northeastern shore of the province, reported the CBC.

The most populous nation in Africa, Nigeria, with 191 million people today, will easily pass the United States to become the world’s third most populous nation by mid-century, says the UN Population Division in a biennial global population forecast. In a much shorter time span—just seven years—India will become the most populous nation on Earth, displacing China.

For the third year in a row, Americans can put on a backyard barbecue for less than $6 a person, based on a survey of grocery prices across the country, says the largest U.S. farm group. To feed 10 people, the 14-item shopping list would cost $57.70, or about $5.70 a person, down marginally from last year.

At least the third study in a year has found that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. A recent report in Nature Climate Change said that the rate of sea level rise had grown from 2.2 millimeters per year in 1993 to a 3.3-millimeter annual rise in 2014.

African-American farmers lost millions of acres of land across the South as a result of an obscure legal provision that is only now being corrected in state legislatures around the country, according to FERN’s latest story by Leah Douglas produced in partnership with The Nation magazine. (No Paywall)

In the first of several class-action lawsuits pending against Syngenta, a federal-court jury awarded $217.7 million to farmers who blamed the seed company for a collapse in corn prices when China rejected cargoes of corn that included the genetically modified Syngenta strain.

After a commercial fisherman pulled a live Asian carp out of a northern Illinois river that empties into Lake Michigan, authorities have expressed concern that more of the invasive species have made it past electric barriers meant to keep them out of the Great Lakes, says the LA Times.

Some 700 rural hospitals, which serve a largely older, sicker, and poorer population than most U.S. hospitals, are at risk of closing. Now, with the cuts to Medicaid being considered in Washington as part of the healthcare debate, their prospects could be even darker.

As average summertime temperatures rise across the West and southern Plains, wildfires are also becoming more frequent. Already this year, they have consumed more than 2.5 million acres.

The grizzly bear will soon be delisted as an endangered species in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, according to a statement from the Department of the Interior. The area around Yellowstone National Park covers more than 20,000 square miles of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who won election in 2012 by 2,936 votes, “is staring down an exceedingly difficult reelection campaign in a state where President Donald Trump is beloved,” says Politico in a story headlined, “North Dakota’s last Democrat?”

Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, with firsthand experience as an organic farmer, says the Trump administration’s proposals to cut USDA funding for organic agriculture programs “seem especially foolish and shortsighted” and that the integrity of the USDA “certified organic” seal must be protected.

In less than four months, USDA inspectors rejected 1.9 million pounds of fresh beef from Brazil, a worrisome 11 percent of shipments from that country during that time. Now Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has suspended all Brazilian beef imports, saying, “My first priority is to protect American consumers.”

Nearly every article on food waste includes these stats: 40 percent of food in this country, worth $165 billion, is wasted each year. But a study from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Applied Economics says that those numbers are only estimates and may actually be inaccurate.

Spring and early summer are the wet season for the northern Plains, a cattle, wheat, and corn-growing region, so the dry start to this year’s growing season could have a lasting impact, says the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor.