Nearly half of the fruit and vegetables grown on U.S. farms never reach consumers, because the “cult of perfection” demands perfectly shaped peppers and blemish-free apples, says the Guardian.

$100,000 NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences. The prize, to recognize "a mid-career scientist at a U.S. institution who has made contribution" to the fields, would join the $250,000 World Food Prize as a prestigious award for work in food and agriculture.

Brazil will harvest a smaller-than-expected 70 million tonnes of corn this marketing year, said USDA, lowering its forecast by 7.5 million tonnes in one month because of adverse weather. Brazil is the third-largest corn grower in the world, trailing the United States and China, and is a U.S. competitor for export sales.

The United States is a meat-eating nation — one of the biggest consumers in the world — and is chewing its way toward its highest per-capita consumption since the recession of 2008-09. The USDA estimates Americans will consume an average 214.7 pounds per person of red meat and poultry this year, an increase of 3.8 pounds per person from last year due to larger livestock production.

For the second time since May, researchers reported discovering bacteria resistant to colistin, a last-resort antibiotic, in a patient receiving medical treatment, said Medscape Medical News. The discovery was part of an international search to gauge the prevalence of the resistant bacteria, which also have been found in livestock and are viewed as a salient threat to the antimicrobials used to treat and prevent disease.

Senate Judiciary chairman Charles Grassley is sponsoring a bill to make USDA a permanent member of the U.S. panel that decides if foreign purchases of U.S. companies impinge on national security. "This bill will raise the stature of agriculture ... so we don't make the mistake of selling too much control of our food supply to foreign countries," Grassley told reporters.

The campaign against a checkoff program for the organic industry says more farmers oppose the proposal than favor it, and it cites its 57-page petition as proof. Not so, responded the Organic Trade Association, which says half of the signatures on the petition are duplicates or come from people who are not farmers.

Even though big food companies like Walmart, General Mills and McDonald’s pledged to sell only cage-free eggs, producers are growing wary of investing in cage-free housing because “those premium eggs simply are not selling well,” reports American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Fertilizer runoff could be reduced significantly if row crops such as corn and soybeans are replaced with perennial grasses harvested for biofuel production, say researchers from four Midwestern universities. Nitrogen runoff in the Mississippi River basin, blamed for creation of a "dead zone" each summer in the Gulf of Mexico, could drop 15-20 percent if switchgrass or miscanthus were planted on a quarter of the land now devoted to row crops, according to computer simulations.

“Four in 10 University of California students do not have a consistent source of high-quality, nutritious food,” says the Los Angeles Times, citing a recent survey of the state’s public university system. Of the 9,000 student respondents, 19 percent said they occasionally went hungry, while another 23 percent said they had enough money to eat, but didn’t always have access to high-quality, nutrient-dense foods.

Federal officials are crafting an agreement to divide the steelhead and salmon catch in the Columbia River watershed between tribal, sport and commercial fishermen, says The Seattle Times. The plan would cover fishing rights in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State, probably for the next 10 years if the length of previous agreements is any indicator.

Paris-based Danone SA reached a deal to buy WhiteWave Foods for $10.4 billion, a merger "that would hand it a slice of the fast-growing market for organic food and more than double its North American revenue," said the Wall Street Journal. Organic food is 5 percent of the U.S. food sales, with large annual increases.

High corn and soybean yields will bring bumper crops, traders said in anticipation of the USDA Crop Production and WASDE reports to be issued today. In surveys by Bloomberg and Reuters, analysts said the fall harvest will be bigger than thought a month ago, which will fatten U.S. inventories and hold down commodity prices for months to come.

Restoring grasslands and other ecosystems that have been destroyed by agriculture can take decades. But a team of ecologists from The Netherlands has discovered a way to do it in just six years—by “inoculating” the degraded soil with a thin layer of soil from a healthy field, according to a report in Science on a study published in the journal Nature Plants.

Despite a steady bombardment of advice about the importance of eating a healthy diet, Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables on average than they were in the 1990s, said the USDA’s Economic Research Service, which analyzed annual consumption rates for 120 varieties of raw, dried, canned, frozen and juiced produce between 1994-98 and 2007-2008.

In Japan, the season’s first fruits are prized possessions, bought by the rich as status symbols. Last week, a grocery store owner broke world records, when he bid 1.1 million yen at an auction—nearly $11,000—for a cluster of 30 grapes that took 14 years to grow, The Guardian reports.

The House gave final congressional approval, 359-53, to a bill that calls for a comprehensive U.S. strategy to reduce hunger and malnutrition in developing nations. President Obama praised passage of the bill, which makes permanent the Feed the Future program, an early initiative of his administration.