The amount of U.S. acres in organic farmland increased 11 percent in 2016 from 2014 numbers to reach 4.1 million acres, says a report by the data-service company Mercaris. The individual number of organic farms also jumped in that period by 1,000, to 14,979. The increase is largely due to consumer demand and economics, Scott Shander, an economist at Mercaris, told Civil Eats.

Food and ag policy consultant Michael Torrey, a former Senate staffer and USDA official, is leading the Trump transition effort for the Agriculture Department, reports Politico, citing an organizational chart circulating on Capitol Hill. Torrey was was a deputy assistant agriculture secretary and later deputy USDA chief of staff during President George W. Bush's first term.

The EPA approved a low-drift formulation by Monsanto of the weedkiller dicamba for use on GE soybeans and cotton during the growing season. Farmers reported dicamba damage to 42,000 acres of crops this year due to use of unapproved, higher-volatility versions of the herbicide on neighboring farms.

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned as a supporter of corn ethanol and said he would protect farmers from over-regulation. His senior advisor, Sam Clovis, said the New York businessman does not support the idea, popular among conservative House Republicans, of splitting food stamps from the rest of the farm bill.

Farm groups that said they wanted protection against out-of-state animal rights activists and anti-GMO campaigners failed to persuade Oklahoma voters, who rejected a proposed right-to-farm amendment to the state constitution by a landslide. The defeat, along with passage of a Massachusetts referendum on livestock welfare, dented the reputation of farm lobby, which failed to stop a nationwide GMO disclosure law in July.

The fish on the menu may be mislabeled, but there's a good chance it's less endangered than the real things, says Grist. About 30 percent of fish is misnamed, whether because of fraud or human error. But when University of Washington researchers collected data from 43 studies that DNA-tested fish for mislabeling, they found that on average the actual fish on the plate were 3 percent cheaper and nearly 10 percent better in terms of conservation status, according to extinction risk data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In the floods caused by Hurricane Matthew, manure lagoons on North Carolina hog farms "withstood the storm remarkably well," said the North Carolina Pork Council. Fourteen lagoons were flooded and only one lagoon was partially breached — on a farm that has not housed hogs "for more than five years, significantly minimizing the environmental impact."

An annual report on global agriculture says productivity growth is stagnating in low-income countries at 1.3 percent, far below the 1.75-percent increase needed yearly to assure enough food and fiber for a world population forecast to be 9.7 billion in 2050. The Global Harvest Initiative, a coalition of agribusinesses and consulting groups, says the productivity rate is growing at 1.73 percent worldwide currently, the third year in a row that it has run below the target.

At least 30 medical centers across the nation have restricted the sale of soda and full-calorie energy drinks, a list that includes the Cleveland Clinic, says the New York Times. UC-San Francisco, with a health sciences center, has gone a step farther by stopping sales entirely of sugar-sweetened beverages on its campus and creating the setting to study the impact on people who formerly drank the beverages during the work day.

Beef prices set records in 2014 due to short supplies and rising demand in the U.S. and overseas, encouraging cattle producers to chase profits by expanding their herds. Now, despite declining prices for corn, they're cutting back because slaughter cattle prices this year are forecast by USDA to be an average 18 percent lower than last year.

Floods spawned by Hurricane Matthew killed "at least tens of thousands of chickens, hogs and other livestock" in eastern North Carolina, said the Washington Post. Some environmentalists said the losses could reach the millions because of the large livestock production in the flooded area; North Carolina is one of the largest hog and broiler-chicken producers in the nation.

In California, fishermen and conservationists are putting pressure on fisheries managers to re-open the U.S. swordfish catch, which had been heavily restricted to protect endangered species frequently caught in gill nets, says the San Diego Tribune.

The five-year period from 2011 to 2015 was the hottest on record, according to a report released by the World Meteorological Organization at international climate talks in Marrakech, Morocco. “Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, reports the Seattle Times.

Three months after Congress passed a law for mandatory disclosure of GMO ingredients in food, five dozen farm and food industry groups asked Congress to assure access to "modern agricultural tools." They also asked for a $3 million appropriation so the FDA and USDA can "educate the public" about use of biotechnology in the food and agriculture sector.

When U.S. Wheat Associates began looking for a new president, its search committee decided to look within the industry. In the end, the organization found its candidate inside its own ranks — Vince Peterson, its vice president of overseas operations.

The annual World Food Prize conference opens today in Des Moines, providing a setting for Purdue to launch its post-harvest initiative against food waste. The initiative is a bundle of projects to prevent food loss after harvest, improve nutrition, support food entrepreneurs and build agricultural value chains, says the university.

Greenhouses in the Salinas Valley of California are selling for millions of dollars because marijuana has come to Monterey County, said the Los Angeles Times. The land rush "was touched off by efforts to ban the crop from the canyons and forests of the Big Sur area and sequester it inside existing greenhouses, where it can more easily be monitored and, perhaps more importantly, taxed."