The so-called tax extenders package, to retroactively revive more than 50 tax breaks for 2014, may be one of the last items of business for the Senate this week.

Republicans named four new members to the Senate Agriculture Committee, effective with the new legislative session beginning in January - David Perdue of Georgia, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Ben Sasse of Nebraska - when the GOP becomes the majority party.

Climate change could create a new kind of empty calories, by indirectly reducing the nutrition content of food crops, says the Guardian.

A rainy December is putting water into California's depleted reservoirs and snowpack on the Sierra Nevada, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Led by sugar growers and processors, farm groups in Idaho are considering whether to push for a state law against labeling food made with genetically modified organisms, says Capital Press.

The outlook for U.S. poultry producers for 2015 is strong, says Rabobank in a report on the industry around the world. Producers in the United States and Brazil "could benefit from ongoing bullish market conditions such as...

Drought will persist or intensify during winter in Washington state, Oregon and the northern two-thirds of California as well as the wheat-growing southern Plains, forecasts the National Weather Service.

Corn futures prices are the highest in five months and "are expected to remain firm to slightly higher" for the near term, says economist Darrel Good of U-Illinois.

The outbreak of Ebola infections in western Africa is disrupting food production so that hundreds of thousands of people will face hunger in coming months, says The Atlantic.

The power of comfort food, be it ice cream, artisanal chocolate or Mom's meatloaf, to cure a bout of the blues may be overrated, says the New York Times, describing a study by University of Minnesota researchers.

The antihunger Food Research and Action Center says recent declines in the number of children in the school lunch program is due to demographics and not changes in the menus to cut down on fat, salt and sugar.

With cattle prices at record highs, grassland prices are a good bet to rise in the coming year, the head of a farm management company tells DTN.

U.S. soybean exports are headed for a record 1.77 billion bushels this marketing year, nearly 45 percent of the largest crop ever grown by U.S. farmers, says USDA. If the estimate proves true, exports would be 7 percent larger than last season.

Back as the No 1 rice exporter in the world, Thailand will export a record 11 million tonnes of rice during 2015 due in part to higher demand from Indonesia, whose population is growing more rapidly than rice production, said the Agriculture Department in...

Day care operators would be barred from frying food for meals served to children and adults under rules proposed by USDA. The government says the proposal, published in the Federal Register, would align day-care meals with school lunch reforms.

North American Meat Institute, the result of a trade group merger, said it hired Fred Thompson, as its senior vice president of legislative affairs.

Land prices declined in 12 Midwestern and Plains states but held steady or improved slightly in the South according to Farmers National Co, a farm management and real estate company, says AgWeb.

The Agriculture Department announced an expansion of the Noninsured Crop Disaster Program (NAP) to cover more crops and at higher levels of protection. NAP operates like insurance for crops not covered by the federally subsidized insurance program.

U.S. beer consumption is headed in two different directions. So-called craft beer from brewpubs and micro-breweries is rising in popularity while people are drinking less of the light lager produced by the big beer companies.