The nonprofit Seattle Jobs Initiative will receive a $3.6 million grant to set up and operate a Center of Excellence to help states hone the employment and training programs offered through the food stamp program, the USDA announced. The center is part of an initiative in the 2014 farm law to help poor people find jobs and move up the employment ladder.

For Huey Johnson, the "grand old man" of environmentalists in California, "the idea of rearing salmon in fallowed rice fields started in a duck blind," says Yale e360. Surrounded by acres of flooded fields, Johnson wondered what could be done with all the water. "His answer: Grow fish."

In a rain-making ritual, women in a village in Java chant, "All farmers let us pray that rain comes and washes our sorrow away," reports Reuters. Seasonal rains are late in reaching Java, the main rice-growing island of Indonesia, the fourth-most populous nation in the world with 254 million people.

Big Data offers the opportunity for farmers to "instantaneously collect data about almost every facet of their cropping operations from planting through harvest," says Feedstuffs. But Missouri Farm Bureau president Blake Hurst told a House Agriculture subcommittee that producers want assurance of confidentiality or, at a minimum, to know how the information will be used and who else has access to it.

A senior scientist at USDA's Agricultural Research Service filed a whistleblower complaint that accuses the department of "suppressing research findings that could call into question the use of a popular pesticide class that is a revenue powerhouse for the agrichemical industry," said Harvest Public Media.

For most U.S. schoolchildren, milk at school comes in a waxy half-pint carton. Golden Hills Elementary School, near Omaha, is trying something different, says Modern Farmer - milk in a bag. School officials say there is less waste with bags than with cartons.

Members of the European Parliament rejected a proposal to let EU countries ban imports of genetically engineered food and livestock feed, potentially killing “an initiative that was greeted with widespread criticism," reports Bloomberg.

A doctors' group petitioned the USDA for the second time in six years to remove processed meats such as hot dogs from the school lunch program to "create carcinogen-free cafeterias." The 12,000-member Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed the petition a day after a WHO agency declared processed meat a carcinogen and that red meat is probably carcinogenic to humans.

Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts said "we're nearly at the finish line" on closed-door negotiations to reauthorize child-nutrition programs that cost $21 billion a year, said Agri-Pulse. At a news conference, Roberts said the legislation would not provide new funding for the nutrition programs, which are headlined by school lunch - "That's just the way it is."

The company that developed GMO potatoes that resist bruising will work with two universities to develop genetically modified blight-resistant potatoes for farmers in Indonesia and Bangladesh, reports Capital Press. A spokesman for JR Simplot Co., based in Boise, said the new varieties may be available for cultivation in five years.

Across the country, farmers and ranchers are relying more and more on loans to pay their operating expenses, says a quarterly report on agricultural lending. Farm banks issued $88 billion in non-real estate loans during July, August and September, the highest third-quarter total since 1997 when adjusted for inflation.

A private foundation has paid $60,000 since 2008 to underwrite international prayer trips by Rep. Robert Aderholt, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees USDA, reports Roll Call. Aderholt told the newspaper there was "absolutely nothing" improper in the travel.

Workers at poultry processing plants endure "grim" conditions, says Oxfam America, in a report that calls for a better working environment at plants run by the four largest companies - Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Perdue and Sanderson Farms.

Like U.S. agriculture overall, 40 percent of California's agricultural exports go to nations that are part of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade bloc, say three UC-Davis economists. In a newsletter, they say the agreement, if approved, "would lower import barriers and facilitate export for many of California's significant agricultural exports to the Pacific Rim nations - most importantly in Japan."

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack went to the national conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics to enlist its members as defenders of federal child nutrition programs against "a vocal minority" that would weaken them.

The giant seed company Monsanto will close three research and development centers, in Wisconsin, Connecticut and North Carolina, this year in a cost-cutting move, reports Reuters. About 90 jobs will be eliminated.

The Agriculture Department said it will award $102 million in loan guarantees and $71 million in grants for 1,114 small rural businesses and agricultural producers to install renewable energy systems or improve energy efficiency in their operations.

Antelope Island, off the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, with Salt Lake City on the horizon, offers a rare opportunity for cowhands to herd wild bison, reports the New York Times. Participants are a mix of weathered ranchers and urbanites (who herd paperwork most of the year) who "spend a day on horseback chasing hundreds of bison toward corrals" in an annual roundup on a state park.