In a study carried out as part of a simulation of space travel to Mars, an international team of scientists found that salty diets resulted in less water consumption and a higher demand for food.

Although some 70 percent of U.S. egg production will come from cage-free hens in 2025 to meet food industry commitments, the market for cage-free eggs is thin at the moment, says United Egg Producers

Four decades ago, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz told row-crop farmers to “get big or get out,” a choice that marijuana growers may be facing in California as “cannabis is going industrial,” says the New York Times.

At a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing early this month, the National Cotton Council, an industry trade group, said growers are “vulnerable to further instability” due to low cotton prices.

The recession of 2008–09 “continues to reverberate in rural America and is the most likely cause of a slight decline in population from 2005–16,” says the Daily Yonder. It was a record fifth consecutive year of decline.

The nonpartisan Plate to Politics program describes its goal as strengthening the “leadership role of women transforming our nation’s food system, from the federal agriculture policy agenda to what’s on our family’s dinner plate.“

Students at Colorado State University have started a petition drive because of plans to " build a new facility that houses a meat harvesting facility, which some students call a slaughterhouse," says the Rocky Mountain Collegian. The facility is part of a partnership with JBS USA, part of the giant meatpacking company based in Brazil.

The University of California has turned to the U.S. appeals court based in Washington, D.C., in a dispute with the Broad Institute over who owns the patents for the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR, says The Verge. "This means the heated battle over who owns one of the most revolutionary biotech inventions of our time will likely continue for months or even years from now," the report says.

Worried that Trump administration cuts to the EPA will mean slashing thousands of jobs, EPA employees are organizing to defend their work, says NPR. At one union hall in Washington, D.C., dozens of EPA staffers filed in to discuss the issue. NPR spoke with Marie Owens Powell, an EPA enforcement officer and local union leader.

An Italian researcher says results of a study on animal health and the weedkiller glyphosate will be published in time for an EU decision on whether to allow continued use of the herbicide, says Reuters. Preliminary results show no initial adverse reaction in rats exposed to the herbicide in levels equal to that allowed in humans.

For more than a year, chicken has been a rare item in Los Angeles public school cafeterias, reflecting the school board's policy to hold vendors responsible for animal and worker welfare among other things and the challenge of finding enough food for the nation's second-largest school system. The Los Angeles Times says chicken tenders, patties and frankfurters will be back as soon as May now that three new vendors are under contract.

When drought reduced streamflows and irrigation water allotments, growers in California's Central Valley pumped more water from their wells. Now a study by NASA and Stanford scientists says decades of overpumping permanently reduced the storage capacity of the aquifer beneath the valley by 336,000 to 606,000 acre-feet, which could exceed the capacity of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir that is the primary water supply for San Francisco.

In testing an array of foods and beverages for the weedkiller glyponsate, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found excessive residue levels in 3.9 percent of the grain products sampled, says The Western Producer. The agency ran tests on 3,188 food samples, and while it detected traces of glyphosate in nearly 30 percent of them, only 1.3 percent of the samples overall exceeded the government limits.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has reversed plans to transfer control of the National Bison Range to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When tribes called for the change in 2016, they claimed the federal government had taken the land from American Indians without their consent.

Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest pork producer, is launching a bioscience arm to ramp up company sales of pig parts for medical procedures. The $14-billion subsidiary of China’s WH Group hopes to one day offer pig organs for human transplants.

Conservatives intent on reversing the Obama administration’s climate-change legacy are angry that EPA chief Scott Pruitt hasn’t gone further. They’d like to see him try to reverse the “endangerment finding” that provides the legal framework for the Clean Power Plan and other climate-change policies.

A coalition of small-government, anti-tax, and anti-waste groups says the 2018 farm law should abolish many of the subsidies now available to producers and "only provide risk-related assistance for uncontrollable natural events," such as major crop losses. "Farmers — especially those with operations with a million dollars or more in sales that account for most agricultural production — are more than capable of competing in the marketplace," say the 15 groups in a letter to lawmakers.