Strawberry researcher Douglas Shaw "found himself in a legal jam," says The Associated Press in covering a dispute in which UC-Davis is suing Shaw and his research partner, "alleging they stole the school's intellectual property by taking some of the fruits of their research with them" when they left the school. The scientists have filed a $45-million countersuit that says UC-Davis is sitting on their advances.

A report from the antihunger group Feeding America says that food insecurity rates are highest in rural counties and in the South, says the news site CityLab. For the report, Feeding America combined data from USDA, the Census Bureau and the Labor Department "to stitch together a portrait of food insecurity at the state and county levels," says CityLab, with Jefferson County along the Mississippi River in southwestern Mississippi having the highest rate in the nation, 38 percent.

The amount of GMO crops grown worldwide in 2016 was up from the year before. Increased GMO plantings in Brazil and the United States accounted for most of the rise.

Thieves are stealing fryer oil from restaurants, as the price per pound climbs to 25 cents, up from 7.6 cents per pound in 2000. “[T]hanks to a 2007 energy law, oil companies must use 2 billion gallons of biodiesel this year, 100 million gallons more than last year, and the most ever in U.S. history. Most of that biodiesel is made from soybean oil, but old fryer grease is the second largest (and fastest growing) source,” says Eater.

Kansas farmers sharply scaled back winter wheat sowings because of low market prices, assuring a smaller crop this year than last. Now disease, snowfall, and freeze damage this spring are dragging prospects down even further.

Six U.S. representatives proposed to double, over a five-year period, the funding for two USDA programs that share costs with the private sector in developing overseas markets for American foods. The statutory funding levels for the Market Access Program (MAP) and the Foreign Market Development program (FMD) have not been increased in more than a decade, said lead sponsors Dan Newhouse and Chellie Pingree.

The FAO Food Price Index dropped by 1.8 percent in April, pulled down by lower sugar, cereal, dairy, and vegetable oil prices. Those drops were offset in part by higher meat prices.

The United States uses four times as much road salt as it did 40 years ago, says Stateline, which covers policy at the state level. For financial and environmental reasons, states are trying to reduce salt use with approaches that include adding a bit of sugarcane molasses, cheese brine or dregs from beer-making to liquid salt brine.

Fourth-term Rep. Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania says President Trump has encouraged him to run against incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, in 2018.

Last August, Brazil said it would remove barriers to U.S. beef that were imposed in 2003 to prevent mad cow disease. Nine months later, the first shipment of fresh U.S. beef has cleared customs for sale to Brazilian consumers.

Washington state farmers grow 70 percent of the country’s apples, but this year there’s a new apple on the tree, says NPR. For the first time anywhere, growers are planting a variety known as Cosmic Crisp, named after the yellow, star-like flecks in its flesh.

The Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to take fragile land out of production, is so close to its enrollment limit that the USDA will not admit high-priority land that ordinarily could be enrolled at once.

Some climate skeptics have pointed to a slower rise in global temperature between 1998 and 2012 as evidence that climate change isn't as dramatic as believed or that it has stopped altogether, says The Guardian. But a report out in the journal Nature says that the so-called pause in warming is largely a fact of research groups using data differently — and not a reason to doubt climate change.

Livestock producers typically want to get their animals to market weight quickly so they can sell them and make money. But in poultry, there's rising interest in broiler chickens that take longer to mature and are more expensive to raise, with the trade-off of tastier meat, says the New York Times.

Two former members of the House Agriculture Committee are running for governor in Florida — Democrat Gwen Graham, who served one term in Congress, and Republican Adam Putnam, the state agriculture commissioner since 2010. Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, is term-limited so the race for the governor's mansion is wide open, said Roll Call.

Slightly more than 63 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup last year said they have healthy diets. The figure, based on more than 177,000 interviews as part of a Gallup project with Sharecare, was the lowest since the project began in 2008 and was the sixth year in a row of a decline from the peak of 67.7 percent in 2010.