The farmer-funded National Pork Board "will use an online marketing campaign to counter a critical television documentary on antibiotics use in livestock," says Reuters.

President Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed by telephone to push for speedy agreement of a 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade, says the Xinhua news agency.

Third-term Sen Pat Roberts, potentially the next chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, attended only one-third of the committee's meetings since 2000, says the Topeka Capital-Journal.

On the same day EPA approved the new Dow herbicide, USDA listed four steps it will take in response to the spread of herbicide resistant weeds.

U.S. growers will harvest a record 2.5 billion pounds of canola this season, thanks to above-average yields and near-record plantings, says USDA in its Oil Crops Outlook report.

The agriculture ministers of Liberia and Sierra Leone say the ebola outbreak in western Africa is "exacerbating hunger and wrecking any plans to revitalize the region's farm production," says DTN from the World Food Prize symposium in Iowa.

While U.S. rice production is zooming, California will see its smallest crop in 16 years, said USDA in its Rice Outlook report. The harvest was forecast at 36.4 million hundredweight, down 24 percent due to drought that restricted plantings.

Milk production at the average U.S. dairy farm could fall by as much as 1.4 percent due to the addition heat stress on dairy cows from global warming in 2030 when temperatures could be 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher, says an Agriculture Department study.

The World Trade Organization agreed with U.S. complaints and ruled that India's restrictions on imports of hogs, poultry meat and chicken eggs violate world trade rules.

"An attempted crackdown on minimum wage and child labor violations at berry farms in the Pacific Northwest has sparked a backlash that threatens one of the U.S. Labor Department’s most potent tools for enforcing protections for farm workers," writes Bridget Huber at the news site FairWarning.

The just-adopted constitutional amendment guaranteeing a "right to farm" in Missouri is under challenge before the state Supreme Court. The amendment was approved by voters in August by a 2,375-vote margin out of nearly 1 million cast.

Loans to purchase homes in small towns and in rural America are running far below pre-recession totals, says the Housing Assistance Council in a story on Daily Yonder.

With China scaling back on its imports of cotton, world prices "dipped below 70 cents in early October, a level not seen in five years," said USDA, forecasting a 6 percent cent increase in global cotton stocks this marketing year.

Corn plantings could decline by 3 percent next year without pinching the U.S. supply, swollen by the second record-setting crop in two years, says economist Darrel Good of U-Illinois.

Like the United States, the European Union is reaping a record corn crop this year, says USDA, estimating the European crop at 71 million tonnes.

The opposition to state-level labeling of GMO foods is out-spending the proponents in Colorado and Oregon, which hold statewide referendums on the issue on Nov 4, says Food Safety News.

"From a bedrock of traditional culture, and an engine of the post-Mao economic boom in the 1980s, agriculture has become a burden for China," says the New York Times, "and few in the countryside see their future there."

With Abebgoa to open its $300 million celllulosic ethanol plant in Kansas on Friday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune says there is worry within the industry that debut of large-scale cellulosic plants in the United States may also be the closing act for big plants domestically.