With avocado prices on the rise and American demand booming, Mexican farmers are cutting down trees to plant the fruit. “Avocado trees flourish at about the same altitude and climate as the pine and fir forests in the mountains of Michoacan, the state that produces most of Mexico’s avocados,” says The Seattle Times.

Too Good To Go, a food rescue app, has convinced restaurants in six countries to sell end-of-the-day food at a discount to hungry locals in an effort to reduce food waste. The six-month-old app has a major presence in the UK, with a waitlist of 95 London eateries anticipating its August launch, Eater writes.

To bolster milk prices and help keep dairy farmers in business, the USDA should buy up to 90 million pounds of cheese and donate it to food banks, says the National Milk Producers Federation.

Cargill has stopped using an important human antibiotic to prevent disease in turkeys, Reuters reported. It was the latest step by a major meat processing company to drop an antibiotic because of concerns about the the impact on public health. Cargill has not used the drug, gentamicin, to prevent disease in turkeys that supply its two biggest brands, Honeysuckle White and Shady Brook Farms, since Aug. 1, a company statement said. Cargill said it would continue to use antibiotics to treat sick turkeys and to stop the spread of a disease within flocks that include sick birds.

Better access to supermarkets and grocery stores doesn’t necessarily inspire people to eat better, according to a study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In fact, researchers found that U.S. adults buy most of their junk-food at such stores. The findings fly in the face of the “food desert” theory, which holds that people in neighborhoods without grocery stores are more likely to eat unhealthy food.

Hotter ocean temperatures have nearly tripled the incidence of waterborne food illnesses, says the Seattle Times. Roughly a dozen species of vibrio bacteria make people sick from eating undercooked seafood — particularly raw oysters — and from swimming in tainted water.

The administrative arm of the European Union opened an in-depth review of the proposed $130 billion merger of Dow and DuPont, identifying its three primary areas of concern as seeds, pesticides and petrochemicals.

Water efficiency projects sound like a win-win for western farmers and the environment. But most of the money — including the $50 million recently pledged by the U.S. Department of Interior and the USDA — spent trying to save water on farms fail to take human nature into account and may make the problem worse.

Synthetic fertilizer accounts for more than a third of the 1.8 million tons of new nitrogen entering California each year, and animal feed accounts for another 12 percent, making agriculture the largest single source of nitrate pollution in the state, according to a new report from the UC Davis Agriculture Sustainability Institute and the University of California division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

In the more than two years since Subway was called out by a blogger for using azodicarbonamide, a chemical found in yoga mats and other non-food items, to make its bread dough lighter and stronger, a slew of fast-food chains have followed Subway’s lead and removed the chemical—but unlike Subway they’ve done it quietly, with little or no publicity, says Bloomberg.

The Obama administration “took an important procedural step toward putting the Trans-Pacific Partnership before Congress” by outlining the legislation that would align U.S. law with the 12-nation free-trade agreement, said Agri-Pulse.

Iowa owes its incredibly productive soil to the prairie—the same prairie that farmers have spent decades ripping out, says The Washington Post. Midwestern growers were long instructed to destroy native grasslands in order to make room for row crops. But a new program called STRIPS (Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips) hopes to convince the state’s farmers that they can decrease soil erosion and fertilizer runoff by planting native grasslands in between their regular crops.

In an effort to raise the efficiency of its agriculture sector, China announced this week that it will for the first time allow commercial production of GMO soy, reports Reuters. Until now, China has not allowed the production of a GMO food crop out of concern that consumers would react negatively over perceived health risks.

Olympic athletes have to customize their diets to fit their sport, reports NPR. Swimmers like Michael Phelps can pound back 12,000 calories a day and go especially heavy on the pasta and bread before a race. But gymnasts and wrestlers stay away from heavy meals on the day of a competition, in order to stay nimble.

The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention, a global health organization, has expanded its food-fraud database to give food manufacturers a more holistic picture of fraud and help them detect patterns of abuse over time, according to Feedstuffs.

Even though the deadline for large facilities to comply with the FDA's rigorous new "preventive controls rule for human food" is Sept. 16, the need for additional training means the agency's inspectors likely won't start enforcing it until January, according to Food Safety News.

Rep. Eric Swalwell led five additional California House members urging the EPA to put the Renewable Fuel Standard program "back on track by finalizing blending targets that are in line with Congress’ original intent." In a letter to the EPA, the lawmakers said the tepid rise in the RFS announced earlier this year falls short of the statutory volumes set by Congress and "sends a chilling signal to biofuels investors."

South Dakota State University will launch the nation's first four-year degree in precision agriculture this fall, with a goal of educating "the next generation of innovators," reports AgWeb

U.S. pistachio production is expected to fall by half in the 2015/2016 crop year, causing the global crop to contract by 86,000 tonnes to 529,000 tonnes, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service reported. The U.S. pistachio crop is in an off-year cycle of its alternate-bearing harvest, where trees produce a greater than average crop one year, and a lower than average crop the next.

Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, has asked the EPA to revoke the Hawaii Department of Agriculture’s authority to enforce federal pesticide regulations, claiming the department’s pesticide program is understaffed and effectively failing to do its job, reports Honolulu Civil Beat. “The public is at risk and the Department of Agriculture is asleep at the wheel,” Paul Achitoff, managing attorney of Earthjustice, told Civil Beat.