A late-season drought slashed Brazilian corn production 20 percent earlier this year, but the USDA's early forecast is for a startling rebound for 2016/17, with a record crop of 86.5 million tonnes within reach.

With record numbers of tourists traveling to Cuba, including from the U.S., visitors are eating more than their fair share of the island's food, says The New York Times. Onions, green peppers, garlic and avocados — staples of the local diet — are now scarce, since they’ve largely been sold to privately-owned restaurants on the island that serve tourists.

By a 3-to-1 margin, the Senate passed and sent to President Obama a water infrastructure bill that changes how much water is shipped to Southern California and San Joaquin Valley farmers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The bill was criticized by environmentalists and the fishing industry, reports the Los Angeles Times, and a court challenge is likely if Obama signs the bill into law.

Environmental activists are being assassinated around the world because of their opposition to the palm oil industry, says Jocelyn Zuckerman in FERN's latest story, published with The New Yorker.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who filed suit to block the Waters of the United States rule and who challenged the Obama administration on climate change, is President-elect Donald Trump's choice to run the EPA. Before the transition team circulated word of the choice, Jason Miller, communications director for the transition, said Pruitt "led Oklahoma's legal challenges to the EPA, Obamacare, executive actions on illegal immigration, Dodd-Frank and President Obama's repeated attempts to bypass Congress."

General Mills is teaming up with the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation nonprofit, to help save pollinators, says The Guardian. The food manufacturer, which has contributed $4 million to other pollinator conservation projects since 2011,says it will give $2 million to the Xerces-led program to make 100,000 acres of North American farmland pollinator-friendly over the next five years.

The Field to Market alliance says in an assessment issued every four years that, on the whole, 10 major U.S. crops have produced more yield on less land with improved environmental outcomes on a per-unit-of-production basis. The alliance calls this "a significant step toward a more sustainable farming system," but cautions that "improvements are plateauing for a number of crops and indicators."

The Almond Board of California is launching a research initiative to find uses for the byproducts of almond processing, which includes the hulls and shells, says the Business Journal of Fresno, Calif. The results could be biodegradable plastics and additives for pharmaceuticals or biofuels, according to Glenda Humiston of University of California's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

President-elect Donald Trump's lineup for agency heads is comprised of people who have deeply opposed the policies of President Obama on social programs, public lands, the environment, labor issues, and veterans affairs, says The New York Times.

With enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve nearing its statutory limit of 24 million acres, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced revisions in the program to protect water quality and to benefit wildlife, pollinators and wetlands. Under one of the changes, USDA will pay up to 90 percent of the cost of environmentally beneficial practices, such as bioreactors and saturated buffers that clean up run-off from drainage lines running beneath cropland.

The largest peach grower in Missouri — Bader Farms — claims Monsanto is responsible for the illegal use of herbicide that damaged its trees over the past two years, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The lawsuit says 37,000 trees were harmed because of herbicide drift from a field where farmers used unauthorized versions of dicamba on crops, which were genetically engineered by Monsanto to tolerate the weedkiller.

The Justice Department review of the merger of Dow and DuPont is "pretty far down the road" and the arrival of Donald Trump as president is unlikely to affect the transaction, said DuPont chief executive Ed Breen in a Reuters interview. "I don't think it will have any impact," said Breen, who noted the review is being handled by career civil servants.

They may be leftists or right-wing, but anti-establishment populists in Europe "share common ground in their core constituencies, rural voters," says the New York Times. "Just as Donald J. Trump rolled up a big rural vote in his unexpected presidential victory, Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against urban residents viewed as elites."

The chief executive of CKE Holdings, which owns two burger chains, is President-elect Donald Trump's selection to run the Labor Department. Andrew Puzder is "an out-spoken critic of raising the minimum wage, the Affordable Care Act and 'nanny state' regulations that he believes have slowed growth in the industry – things like proposed soda bans and restrictions," says NPR.

Slightly more than 60 million people live in rural America, and they are far more likely to own their homes than people living in cities, says the Census Bureau, extracting data from its American Community Survey. The data say rural Americans are more likely to be military veterans and to live in the same state as where they were born.