Two Republican-held House seats in the heavily agricultural Central Valley of California could be ripe for picking by Democrats if voters are riled by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's criticism of Hispanics and immigrants, says the Los Angeles Times. Rep. David Valadao, a member of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees USDA and FDA funding, represents a district that is 71 percent Latino, and Agriculture Committee member Jeff Denham has a district that is 26 percent Latino.

Advocates of a 2-cent per ounce tax on distributors of soda and other sugary drinks in Boulder, Colo., won a court verdict that clears the way for the proposal to appear on the Nov. 8 ballot, said the Daily Camera newspaper. Three California cites -- San Francisco, Oakland and Albany, all in the Bay Area -- have soda-tax referendums on their general election ballots.

Record-setting corn and wheat harvests worldwide will pull the average prices for this year's crops to lower prices than expected early this year, says a University of Missouri think tank. Although soybean prices will be higher than the think tank's projections in April, the three crops — accounting for 232 million acres of farmland this year — suggests no more than a minor recovery is likely.

Too small to support a big box supermarket, some rural towns are turning to alternative grocery store models to feed their populations, says High Country News. In Walsh, Colo., (pop. 600), townspeople invested in $50 shares to jumpstart a grocery store.

Ed Avalos, the agriculture undersecretary in charge of marketing and regulatory programs, will leave USDA in mid-September, said The Hagstrom Report. Given the short time before a new administration takes office, a spokesman told the newsletter that USDA would try to promote someone already in office to handle the job for the next few months.

Chinese officials in Shangdong Province have ratified the country’s first government-backed recommendations for how to slaughter chickens, says the New York Times. The guidelines, which were are not mandatory, are both an attempt to quell activists’ concerns and corner the export poultry market, which increasingly calls for more humane animal production.

Japan bought 2.13 million bushels of U.S. Western White wheat on Thursday, ending a one-month interruption in purchases caused by the discovery of 22 stalks of unapproved GMO wheat in a fallow field in Washington State. U.S. Wheat Associates said trade disruptions related to the rogue wheat were minimal "because every stakeholder approached it in a reasonable way."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told a recent rally in Des Moines that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wants to shut down family farms, impose radical regulations, push tax rates on farms and other businesses to 50 percent and impose an estate tax of up to 45 percent on farms. "We rate the combination of claims as False," concludes the independent fact-checking site Politifact.

A corn disease that originated in South Africa, bacterial leaf stripe, has been found in the heart of the Corn Belt with little known about how it spreads or its affect on yields, says DTN. The disease has been identified in field corn, seed corn, popcorn and sweet corn in nine states from South Dakota to Texas.

With trendy, urban designers calling for “salvaged” wood, barns across the U.S. are being deconstructed and turned into brewery bars and kitchen tables, says NPR. Large-scale farmers rarely use the historic barns anymore, since they’re too small to house massive combines and 5,000 milk cows. Instead farmers are selling the tumble-down buildings to deconstruction crews, who turn around and hawk the wood for $5-$10 a square foot.

A patient treated at a New Jersey hospital carried a strain of E. coli bacteria that is resistant to colistin and carbapenem, two antibiotics that are administered as last-resort drugs against disease and infection. It was the first time that a resistance to two last-ditch antibiotics was found in the United States, and the detection "means there's likely more out there," says medical news site Stat.

Farmers in Vietnam's southernmost province, Ca Mau, in the Mekong River delta, intentionally pierced four dikes erected against saltwater encroachment so they can convert rice paddies to seafood ponds. It was an illegal move, "but we just want to breed prawns to escape poverty," farmer Nguyen Thi Bi told Xinhua news agency as she stood on the edge of a newly created aquaculture pond.

The United States is one of the five largest vegetable producers in the world, yet Americans have for decades disregarded the advice to eat more vegetables, say USDA economists Hodan Wells and Jeanine Bentley. "For Americans to meet the (Dietary) Guidelines' recommendations, their intake of overall vegetables, including legumes, would need to increase by 50 percent," or 0.84 cup per day per person, they write in a special article in the Vegetables and Pulses Outlook.

French President Francois Hollande said the U.S.-EU free-trade agreement under discussion for three years cannot be finalized before President Obama leaves office in January, said BBC News. Hollande was the latest in a series of European officials to question if negotiations can be completed; France's trade minister said he would propose suspension of negotiations at an EU meeting next month.

The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in Chicago to block Deere and Co., the world's largest farm equipment maker, from buying Precision Planting, its chief competitor in selling high-speed seed planters to farmers. The government says the two companies account for at least 86 percent of sales of the planters, which are expected to become the industry standard.