From Vermont’s Lake Champlain to rivers in California, waterways are being overloaded with nutrient pollution running off farms. But Vermont took an approach to cleaning up its waterways that could well serve as a model for other states, especially now that the federal government is in regulatory retreat in the Trump era, writes Paul Greenberg in FERN’s latest story with Eating Well magazine.

Heavy rainfall in May washed the equivalent of an estimated 2,800 rail cars of nitrogen fertilizer down the Mississippi River and will create the third-largest fish-killing "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico in 32 years of monitoring, say federal scientists. They forecast a low-oxygen dead zone of 8,185 square miles, about the size of New Jersey.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that he supports the White House's proposal to cut his department's budget by $1.6 billion, saying "this is what a balanced budget looks like."

The Trump administration has a target for beginning the renegotiation of NAFTA — mid-August — but there is no deadline for wrapping up discussions, assuming that talks are fruitful, said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. "We're going to get a good agreement, one that is transformative," Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee.

The James Beard Foundation announced six winners of its Leadership Award this this year, saying they are "pioneers in their areas of work, including reducing food waste, environmental protection, local and national advocacy, and workplace safety." The winners are Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, chef Dan Barber, author Joan Gussow, food advocate Olivier De Schutter, and the directors of the Food Chain Alliance, Joann Lo and Jose Oliva.

Due to a procedural error on Tuesday, the Arkansas state plant board will re-vote on Friday on whether to temporarily ban use of the weedkiller dicamba, suspected of drifting out of cotton and soybean fields to damage neighboring crops, reported DTN. Some 167 complaints alleging misuse of the herbicide, mostly along the eastern edge of Arkansas, were filed with the state board as of midday Wednesday.

Among the afflictions that drive down honeybee populations, the blood-sucking Varroa mite, which weakens and shortens the life of bees, usually is at the top of the list. A paper in the journal Environmental Entomology says the mite takes advantage of bee industry practices, such as placing colonies near each other and preventing colonies from dividing, to multiply in a hive and to spread to other hives, reports Growing Produce, a specialty crop publication.

In late 2015, looking to avoid a threatened $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs, Congress repealed a requirement that packages of beef and pork sold in the United States say where the animals were born, raised, and slaughtered. Now an activist ranchers’ group has filed suit to reinstate the labels.

Most Americans take access to fast internet connections for granted, but in rural America, nearly four of every 10 people cannot get broadband, a disadvantage when commerce and public services are often routed digitally.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, will sell its Five Rivers Cattle Feeding operation as part of a global divestiture plan intended to generate $1.8 billion. Five Rivers operates feedlots in six western states with a combined capacity of 980,000 head and manages a 75,000-head feedlot in Alberta.

A lawsuit between two neighbors in Colorado could set a precedent for Right to Farm laws, which seek to make it harder to sue family farms, across the country.

City officials in Long Beach, California, are laying the framework for an Urban Agriculture Enterprise Zone program “that would encourage more urban farms to crop up in vacant lots across the city,” says the Press-Telegram.

The Trump administration is considering a different way to manage endangered species. The new approach is based on an algorithm that would channel funds toward plants and animals that have the greatest chance of survival—and away from others.

To feed its 1.3 billion citizens, China is amassing large tracts of agricultural land in Australia, replacing the United States as the second-largest foreign owner of farmland in the country.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, in New England as part of his ongoing review of national monuments, told Reuters that the United States can become a “dominant” energy force by boosting mining and drilling on federal lands.

Faced with 97 complaints of misuse of the weed killer dicamba, the Arkansas state plant board is set to vote today on whether to ban the sale and use of the herbicide on cotton and soybeans for the rest of the growing season, reported DTN.

Almost a third of the world population is now exposed to deadly heatwaves that are a result of climate change, says a study published in Nature Climate Change.

State officials in Michigan drafted a plan that relies on voluntary action by farmers to reduce phosphorus runoff from fields that eventually flows into Lake Erie, where nutrient pollution feeds algal blooms in the western end of the lake, reports MLive Media Group.