The motivation for North Dakota farmer Jack Bruns to dig into the niche market for non-GMO soybeans is the same as every farmer when it comes to selecting seeds: "To make more money," says Marketplace. "But they're a lot trickier to manage," with hurdles ranging from weed control and preventing cross-contamination from biotech beans to presenting a spotless product to the buyer.

The Ag Economy Barometer fell to its lowest reading since March as optimism about the future declined, said Purdue University. Some 79 percent of farmers taking part in the monthly gauge of the farm sector said they expect bad times financially in the 12 months ahead – a jump of 11 percentage points in one month.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller got himself in hot water when a tweet went out from his account calling Hillary Clinton the c-word. Miller, who was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as co-chair (along with GOP funder Charles Herbster) on Trump’s Agricultural and Rural Ag Committee, initially said his Twitter account had been hacked. Later, however, his staff admitted that the fault was theirs. They claimed they had retweeted another tweet without realizing it contained vulgar language.

California growers would be barred from applying many agricultural pesticides within a quarter-mile of public schools and day-care centers during school days under a proposed regulation unveiled by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation. It would be the first statewide standard and would take effect in September 2017, says AgNet West.

First Lady Michelle Obama "planted a garden, waged snappy social media campaigns, and worked behind the scenes with researchers, lawmakers, heads of government departments, schools, and food giants to quietly change what Americans eat," says Vox. Former critics regard her advocacy as "brilliant" and a "godsend," writes Julia Belluz in the story, which coincides with the final harvest by the Obama administration of the kitchen garden on the South Lawn of the White House.

Researchers are developing a new strain of genetically modified rice that contains much higher levels of iron and zinc, says the University of Melbourne. "This has the potential to reduce chronic malnutrition disorders that can be caused by an over-reliance on rice in the human diet," says the university.

Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani yogurt, has become a target of far-right groups angry that he employs 300 refugees in his factories, says the New York Times. Some critics have called for boycotting Chobani, while the company's Twitter feed and Facebook page have been lit up with racist comments.

The United States will continue its run as the world's largest cotton exporter during 2016/17 with shipments up by 26 percent from the previous marketing year, said the International Cotton Advisory Committee. Higher yields and a 20 percent expansion in U.S. plantings will assure an abundant supply for shipment overseas.

An art teacher invited to the groundbreaking for the White House kitchen garden in March 2009 was inspired to co-found a nonprofit, DC Greens, that is involved in many of Washington's healthful-food-access programs, says the Washington Post. Sarah Holway, the teacher, and a friend, Lauren Biel, started DC Greens in 2009 and now have 12 full-time employees.

The Mississippi River, rising from Lake Istasca in northern Minnesota to flow 2,340 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, "is heading toward an ecological precipice," says the Minneapolis Star Tribune in a special report. In five years, 400 square miles of forests, marshes and grasslands in the upper Mississippi have been converted to agriculture and urban development, "endangering the cleanest stretch of America’s greatest river with farm chemicals, depleted groundwater and urban runoff."

In a rare bit of positive news about the U.S. diet, Americans upped their seafood intake by a pound last year to 15.5 pounds, according to the annual Fisheries of the United States Report released by NOAA last week. Even though that only amounts to about four extra seafood meals per person per year, it constitutes the “biggest biggest leap in seafood consumption in 20 years," says NPR.

One day after signing a trade pact with the European Union, the Canadian government said it would start work immediately on implementation. The so-called CETA agreement was regarded for months as an indicator of prospects for a U.S.-EU free-trade agreement; the EU trade commissioner says the initiative is still alive although on the sidelines while the United States chooses its next president.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has placed the first bees ever on the federal endangered species list, with the addition of seven Hawaiian species from the genus Hylaeus, says National Geographic. Yellow-faced bees are the only native bees to Hawaii and the sole pollinators of a beach shrub known as naupaka, known for having flowers that look like they’re missing half their petals.

For the past 27 months, farmers have been paid less than $4 a bushel for their corn crops, "and prices below $4 are expected to persist well into 2017," says economist Darrel Good of the University of Illinois. There are only two paths that could lead to higher prices, he says at farmdoc Daily: a drop-off in South America or a much smaller U.S. crop in the new year.

The FDA found trace amounts of glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, "in a variety of oat products, including plain and flavored oat cereals for babies," says a blog post by Carey Gillam of U.S. Right to Know. It appeared a day after European officials said they would release data from their assessment that glyphosate is "unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans" and two days after a Monsanto-commissioned study said the herbicide was not a threat.

U.S. net farm income, down for the third year in a row, will edge upward in coming years, thanks to modestly higher crop prices, says the think tank Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute in a dour look at the farm economy. As land values decline, the debt-to-asset ratio, a commonly used gauge of farm financial health, will rise to 14 percent in 2019, compared to the current 12 percent.