Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who served two terms as governor of Iowa, says Democrats can make inroads in traditionally Republican rural America this fall due to misgivings among voters about GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Appearing on "The Axe Files,"a podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago, Vilsack said Democrats have a "unique opportunity" but have to act on it to benefit.

The fines for safety lapses are so low that meatpacking companies have little incentive to improve working conditions, says a story by Harvest Public Media on NPR. When Ralph Horner, an employee at JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beef facility was caught on a conveyer built and chocked to death, JBS paid just $38,500 in fines. And that was more than most cases, according to Herb Gibson, director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Denver office, which sends inspectors to the massive Greeley plant. Every day, the plant’s 3,000 employees process roughly 5,600 head of cattle.

Russia will shatter its record for wheat production with a harvest of 72 million tonnes this year, far exceeding the record set in 2008 of 63.7 million tonnes, says USDA. The record crop will vault Russia ahead of the EU as the world's top exporter for the first time, with the United States in third place, according to USDA's Grain: World Markets and Trade report.

The American Farm Bureau Federation asked the USDA to provide emergency assistance to U.S. dairy farmers, including purchasing millions of pounds of cheese for government nutrition programs, as they cope with milk prices at seven-year lows, Agri-Pulse reported. In the past two years, milk sales have fallen $16 billion, AFBF President Zippy Duvall said in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Two feet of rainfall over the weekend put the rice harvest in jeopardy in Louisana, the No. 3 rice state in the country. The deluge drove up futures prices by 6 percent on Monday, the largest one-day gain in five years, said Reuters. The rain flooded rice fields ready for harvest, according to a Louisiana State University rice researcher, and came on the heels of a USDA forecast of a record crop in the Pelican State.

The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) says a new "non-browning" strain of Fuji apple poses no "risk to human health or the environment," AgriPulse reports. It will be the third in Okanagan Specialty Fruits' "Arctic Apple" line to gain USDA approval. The first two were Granny Smith and Golden Delicious varieties.

The U.S. appellate court in San Francisco set a deadline of March 31 for EPA to decide whether to allow continued use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, says Agri-Pulse. In its decision, the three-judge panel said there would be no more extensions of the deadline previously set for this Dec 31. The EPA had asked for six additional months.

Despite a run of record soybean harvests in the U.S., surging demand from China and other importers is expected to cause the U.S. stockpile to drop below the previous year's level for the first time in three years, Bloomberg reports. "Since 2005, China’s imports of the commodity have more than tripled, and it now buys more than 60 percent of the world’s exports," the news service says. "The demand is primarily driven by its livestock sector as a growing middle class consumes more meat."

Beginning this fall, the Capital Area Food Bank, based in Washington, will refuse donations from retailers that include candy, sugary soda or sheet cakes, says Civil Eats. It quotes the food bank's chief executive, Nancy Roman, as saying, "We are providing food on a regular basis to a low-income community and we have a moral obligation that it be good food that's not aggravating their (health) problems."

Agricultural credit conditions throughout the Tenth Federal Reserve District of western Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado and northern New Mexico continued to deteriorate in the second quarter of 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported, and bankers "expect farm income to remain weak in the third quarter."

More than four dozen of the 900 Hmong farmers in Fresno County say the five-year California drought is affecting their operations, mostly by drying up the wells they need to water their crops, says the Sacramento Bee. The refugees from Southeast Asia account for the bulk of the 1,500 small farms in the county and most of them earn a modest income from their rented land, so there is no easy solution.

After naming GOP funder Charles Herbster to be chair of his Agricultural and Rural Ag Committee, Trump has nominated Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller to be co-chair, says Mother Jones—and the press are waiting for the antics to begin.

Toddlers’ food preferences are fickle but a new study reveals that they register social cues about food from adults. “By watching toddlers react to people’s food preferences, researchers found that the little ankle-biters seem to make generalizations about good eats and who will like them based on social identities. Toddlers expected people in the same social groups to like the same foods and appeared puzzled if that wasn’t the case,” Ars Technica writes.

The Cornucopia Institute, an organic food industry watchdog group, said it filed a letter with the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission opposing the proposed acquisition of WhiteWave Foods by French dairy giant, Groupe Danone, for about $10 billion.

Pesticides applied to honeybee hives to kill Varroa mites and other parasites may actually be hurting the bees by damaging bacteria in their guts, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

Funding worldwide for agriculture-technology startups in the first six months of 2016 dropped 20 percent, to $1.8 billion, from the same period last year, even as the number of overall deals rose, Reuters reports.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it has issued a final rule that would hold nations exporting fish and fish products to the United States to the same bycatch standards as U.S. commercial fishing operations.

Ecotrust, a non-profit based in Portland, Ore., opened phase one of a $23 million, 80,000-square-foot campus that is part food hall, part food hub, designed to connect small- and mid-size farms and ranches with their customers, Fast Company says. The Redd on Salmon Street offers a central warehouse where farmers, ranchers, and other producers can stash their products until they’re ready to be distributed, the magazine said.