The school breakfast program, an adjunct to the longer-established school lunch and school milk programs, is reaching a growing number of low-income children — 12.1 million daily during the 2015-16 school year — says a report from an anti-hunger group.

A study in the journal Fish and Fisheries points to a new source of seafood for human consumption: the tons and tons of food-grade fish that is ground into fishmeal each year and used in aquaculture and other places, says the NPR blog The Salt. A quarter of the world's annual fish catch, 20 million tons, is used for fishmeal and the new study says 90 percent of it is suitable for "direct human consumption."

First Lady Melania Trump, who toured Japanese-inspired gardens in Florida with the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, intends to keep the kitchen garden planted by Michelle Obama in 2009. An adviser told CNN, "As a mother and as the First Lady of this country, Mrs. Trump is committed to the preservation and continuation of the White House Gardens, specifically the First Lady's Kitchen Garden and the Rose Garden."

A type of spyware, supposedly restricted to use by law-enforcement agencies, was found on the smartphones of three prominent proponents of the 10-percent excise tax on soda and other sugary beverages adopted by Mexico in 2014, says the New York Times. The spyware piggybacked its way onto phones with harassing messages to the men, one of whom is director of nutrition policy at Mexico's National Institute of Public Health.

The Agricultural Marketing Service will publish a proposal for a California Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) on Feb. 14, says Agri-Pulse. The order would regulate product prices between the farmer and first buyer. And California, which prod

Some of the country’s biggest outdoor retailers, including Patagonia, say they won’t be attending one of Utah’s biggest outdoor trade shows because of the state’s stance on public lands, says High Country News. The show brings tens of millions of dollars to the state each year, while “Utah’s outdoor recreation companies employed 122,000 people and brought $12 billion into the state each year.”

In Louisiana, rising sea levels are threatening the traditional foodways of tribes that for hundreds of years have found their sustenance on the land and in the water, says Barry Yeoman in FERN’s latest story, "Reclaiming Native Ground," in partnership with The Lens and Gravy, the podcast of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Many farmers in California’s Central Valley, where 70 percent of the farmworkers are in the U.S. without documentation, voted for Donald Trump. But as Trump takes a hard line on immigration in his first few weeks in office, some farm owners are worried he won’t make any exemptions for agriculture, says the New York Times.

The city council in Santa Fe, NM, scheduled a public hearing for March 8 on Mayor Javier Gonzales' proposal to put a 2-cent-an-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to generate money for early childhood education, says the New Mexican newspaper. The council agreed unanimously to call the public hearing after an advisory committee voted, 6-1, in favor of the soda tax.

The senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, said she had a productive conversation with President Trump's nominee for agriculture secretary, but did not endorse former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue for the job. So far, Agriculture Committee member Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota is the only Democrat in the Senate to commit to voting for Perdue.

One of the top importers of U.S. corn, Mexico is forecast to harvest a record 26 million tonnes of the crop during the 2016/17 crop year, thanks to larger plantings and favorable rainfall, says USDA's World Agricultural Production report. The crop would exceed the mark set last season of 25.9 million tonnes.

In 2010, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver aired a reality show, "Food Revolution," about Huntington, W.Va., which had been ranked by the Centers for Disease Control as the nation's most unhealthy metropolitan area. The city's schools were at the center of the story. In the latest story from The Food & Environment Reporting Network, published in partnership with The Huffington Post's Highline, reporter Jane Black tells the story of what happened in the Cabell County cafeterias after Oliver left town.

The lean years following collapse of the agricultural boom in 2013 are "raising concerns that the next few years could bring the biggest wave of farm closures since the 1980s," says the Wall Street Journal in a story headlined, "The next American farm bust is upon us."

To satisfy EU regulators, U.S.-based Dow and DuPont offered to sell part of DuPont's crop protection business along with its associated research and development and Dow's business in copolymers and ionomers, said the News Journal. The companies hope to complete their $130 billion merge in the first half of this year.

The U.S. House struck down a Bureau of Land Management rule drafted under the Obama administration that was meant to give the public more say in decision-making around public lands. “BLM officials developed the rule saying it would increase public involvement and incorporate the most current data and technology to decide whether and where drilling, mining and logging will happen on public land,” says The Denver Post.