U.S. officials repeatedly have prodded China for a faster and more open system for deciding whether to approve the import of new genetically engineered strains of crop. A U.S. business group says China is headed in the opposite direction by taking longer to approve a smaller number of GMO varieties — only one in 2016, reports Reuters.

With the safety of Brazilian beef in question in a meat-inspection scandal, the USDA said it will re-inspect and test fall shipments of beef from the South American country for pathogens. The USDA said none of the 21 facilities targeted by Brazilian police have shipped meat to the United States.

The dairy subsidy created in the 2014 farm law, the insurance-like Margin Protection Program, "is not working" but it can be retooled into an effective safety net, the head of the National Milk Producers Federation told the House Agriculture Committee. The changes would provide more assistance to producers during tough times, like the past couple of years, and potentially drive up costs to the government.

With a scandal clouding Brazil's meatpackers, Montana Sen. Jon Tester announced legislation for a 120-day ban on U.S. imports of meat from the South American country. The ban will give USDA "time to comprehensively investigate food safety threats and to determine which Brazilian beef sources put American consumers at risk," said Tester's office.

Days after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Des Moines Water Works against farm runoff, the City Council voted to support a bill in the Iowa House allowing regionalization of the water utility, said the Des Moines Register. The chief executive of the Water Works says the regionalization bill, sponsored by a legislator who is a hog farmer, is retaliation for the lawsuit, which wanted to apply water pollution laws to agricultural runoff.

About 70 percent of Americans want government regulations on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, yet government officials are poised to roll back coal restrictions, says The New York Times, laying out public opinion on climate change in a series of maps.

As costs have dropped, solar panels are becoming a common sight, including in rural America, where farmers are using solar to offset their costs in a variety of ways, says Civil Eats. When farmers move beyond generating electricity for farmstead use into acres of solar panels, it creates a tussle between clean energy and preservation of open spaces for forests and farms, according to a news site in Connecticut, where solar has the upper hand.

Per-capita consumption of meat will climb again this year, according to USDA estimates, up a bit more than 1 percent from 2016 to average out at 217.2 pounds. This time, Americans will proportionally eat more red meat — beef, pork and lamb — than poultry, such as chicken and turkey, but it will be close.

After three Hawaiian counties lost efforts to regulate GMOs and require pesticide disclosure on the local level, Democratic state Rep. Richard Creagan is proposing a change to a state bill that would require agribusinesses to reveal what kinds of pesticides they are using, where they are using them, and in what quantities.

Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from the San Joaquin valley, "once said all he wanted to do was work on a dairy farm," says a profile by The Associated Press of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "He's a long way from raising cattle."

Brazil is the world's largest red meat and poultry exporter, but it is losing customers in a scandal over allegations that meatpackers have sold unsafe products for years, said the BBC. Four markets — China, the EU, South Korea and Chile — that account for nearly one-third of meat exports "have now announced restrictions on Brazilian meat."

The U.S. suicide rate has been on the rise since 1999, and "the gap in rates between less urban and more urban areas widened over time," says the Centers for Disease Control. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency says a new study "provides added support to previous findings that a geographic disparity in suicide rates exists..."

President Trump’s budget slashes all funding to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program, but environmental activists and bipartisan supporters of the program say they are prepared for a sustained fight with the President, says The Washington Post.

After wildfires killed seven people and ravaged more than a million acres of rangeland in Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle, ranchers say they aren’t getting the relief they need from the federal government, reports The New York Times.

A U.S. district judge rejected the legal underpinnings of the Des Moines Water Works' lawsuit that sought to hold drainage districts in northwestern Iowa responsible for nutrient runoff from farms. The judge dismissed the case, ending the chances for a precedent-setting interpretation of clean-water laws. Agricultural runoff generally is exempt from the water pollution laws, but the Des Moines utility argued that the drainage districts were identifiable "point" sources of pollution and should be required to meet clean-water standards.

The disappearance of "biocrusts" in the world’s deserts may help slow climate change — though not without consequences, says a 10-year study in the journal Scientific Reports. Biocrusts are the “tangled masses of mosses, lichens and cyanobacteria” that emerge from the desert floor in places like the Sonoran desert in the American southwest and the Colorado plateau.