The Chinese government offered to sell 4.6 million bales, or 1 million tonnes, of state-owned cotton at prices ranging from 97 cents to $1.13 per pound from a stockpile estimated at nearly 67 million bales.

One of the world's agricultural giants, the European Union, is seeing its wheat and corn crops dwindle due to hot and dry weather that is lowering yields. In its World Agricultural Production report, the USDA lowered its forecast of the EU wheat crop by 2 percent and the corn crop by 3.5 percent from estimates made in early June.

Due to hotter weather and more days without rain, the length of forest fire season has grown by 19 percent over the past 35 years, says a team of researchers.

Japanese media say Tokyo "is prepared to increase its import quota for U.S. rice by 50,000 tonnes a year, about a quarter of the U.S. goal, Reuters said at the end of bilateral talks between trade negotiators.

In Los Animas, Colo, farmers wait their turn to tap the irrigation canal to water a fraction of their acreage. It's called babysitting the water and the work can run all night. The Washington Post visited drought-hit sections of Colorado for a story on how drought dries up growers' finances as well as their land. The past three-and-a-half years have been drier than the Dust Bowl for parts of the state.

Widespread rain - from 3-6 inches, or more, in some places - fell in the central and southern Plains, the heart of the Wheat Belt, over the past month, said the weekly Drought Monitor. Officials said they want to "better assess the impacts from recent precipitation and to consider areas ripe for downgrades next week."

Long-running drought has "shrunk the kernels and disrupted the proteins of winter wheat crops" in the Pacific Northwest, which grows one-fifth of the U.S. crop, says the Seattle Times.

Florida Republican Mario Diaz-Balart, an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform, said House Republican leaders told him "they have no intention to bring this bill to the floor this year,” said Roll Call. Diaz-Balart had drafted a reform bill. It was the latest setback for reform, stalled for a year in the GOP-controlled House. The outlook has been increasingly bleak for the past two weeks.

The Agriculture Department is seeking White House approval of poultry inspection rules that would allow processors to speed up slaughter lines and direct USDA inspectors to devote more time to preventing meat contamination. Approval by the White House budget office would be one of the final steps before the proposal becomes official policy. Submission of the Poultry Inspection Modernization rule was reported by groups on both sides of the issue.

The Senate Finance Committee approved, 23-3, a bill to retroactively revive four dozen tax breaks that expired at the end of 2014.

From Chairman Frank Lucas through junior lawmakers, members of the House Agriculture Committee during a hearing told USDA to speed up a re-calculation of farm yields for crop insurance coverage. The re-calculation, required by the new farm bill, would result in growers being credited with higher yields in many instances and would allow a higher level of coverage.

St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is a leader among medical centers in growing fresh produce on its campus, says Civil Eats.

Children who live on farms with dairy cows run one-tenth the risk of developing allergies as other rural children, say researchers at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. Allergy rates have climbed in recent decades and one frequent explanation is that children are exposed to fewer micro-organism and have fewer infections than in the past, so their immune systems do not develop resistance.

Researchers at Washington State University hope to test a robotic apple picker this fall that is able to work fast enough and gently enough to make it economically viable, says Capital Press.

The government will update its projections of the corn and soybean crops tomorrow at noon ET with analysts expecting a record-setting fall harvest. If the expectations prove true, the second year in a row of mammoth crops would leave the country awash in grain and drive down commodity prices. At Chicago, corn for delivery in December closed on Wednesday at $3.98 a bushel, down 1.6 percent for the day; in May, corn sold for more than $5, said Agrimoney.

Fifteen projects to improve more than 1,844 miles of transmission and distribution lines in rural America will receive a total of $349 million in low-cost federal loans.

That's the line used by Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball, referring to the rare defeat of congressional incumbents in a primary election, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor being this year's headline example. Kondik says an average of six House incumbents and one senator lose a primary each election cycle. In surveying the states yet to hold primaries, Kondik tabbed two farm-state incumbents worth watching: Rep Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee Republican, and Sen Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican.