By investing $18 billion, America could decrease food waste by 20 percent and spur $100 billion in “societal economic value,” says a new report out by Rethink Food Waste Through Economics and Data.

In the U.S., Native Americans will be some of the hardest hit by climate change, says The Smithsonian, and water—or a lack of it—will be at the heart of their struggle.

Frugality is the only way to win praise when you receive public aid, says a University of British Columbia study of the intersection of thrift and pro-social choices.

Thanks to the prolonged decline of petroleum prices, gasoline costs less than ethanol nowadays. But the upside-down situation is not likely to impair exports, says Good in an article at farmdoc daily.

Four years ago, the USDA launched a pilot program that allowed food-stamp recipients to order groceries via the Internet and then pay upon delivery with their EBT cards. "Now, the USDA is embarking on a new phase of modernization, a pilot program dictated by the 2014 farm bill that will allow some websites to accept EBT cards online," says Civil Eats.

Democrat Michael Bennet, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, won the Senate race in Colorado in 2010 with a plurality of 48 percent in a seven-way race. Handicappers say Colorado will be one of the most competitive states this year yet Bennet's prospects are brightening - and could improve markedly due to Republican infighting.

The level of mercury has dropped 50 percent in ocean fish and the level of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) has fallen more than 90 percent in the last 40 years, according to a new review by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

One of the largest U.S. meat packers, privately owned Cargill, said it will reduce by 20 percent its use of "shared class" antibiotics on slaughter cattle in the four feed yards that it owns in the Great Plains and in four additional lots operated by a business partner, Friona Industries.

The USDA is prevented by statute from creating a subsidy program, potentially costing $1 billion a year, for cottonseed, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an essay in Farm Journal. Congress, he says, needs to change the law.

In Fort Morgan, Colorado 130 former employees at a Cargill meatpacking plant are suing the company for religious discrimination, says The New York Times.

Restaurant chain Chipotle will spend up to $10 million to help local farmers cover the cost of new safety tests and compliance with food-safety protocols, reports Bloomberg.

The top FDA official involved in stricter controls on antibiotics in livestock and implementation of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization law, Michael Taylor, will leave the agency on June 1 after more than five years as deputy commissioner.

The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, it might be said, is harshing the vibe of some growers of industrial hemp. The agency nixed its early signals that some farms would be certified as producing an organic crop, says Harvest Public Media.

Cannabis is cropping up as an agricultural moneymaker - marijuana sales in Colorado "were just shy of a billion dollars in 2015," says Harvest Public Media.

Nearly a quarter of the population of South Sudan, some 2.8 million people, urgently needs food assistance "and at least 40,000 people are on the brink of catastrophe," say three UN agencies.

Accurate data on the number of fish hauled aboard fishing ships is vital for management of fish stocks, writes former U.S. senator Slade Gorton, in criticizing the approach now used by the government - putting observers on a limited number of boats.

Regulators set exposure limits for pesticides based on comprehensive studies of the individual product. Scientists from UCLA say in a new report that this approach should be reconsidered because growers often apply pesticides as a mixture.