"At the geographic level, poverty in the United States is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon," says an introductory article in Choices, the journal of agricultural economics. "Compared to rural America, urban America has been experiencing lower poverty rates. This gap has existed since the 1960s, when the poverty rates were first officially calculated, and it has been widening in the last few years."

With the August recess on the horizon, lawmakers seem certain to defer action on the annual spending bills for federal departments until this fall, says Roll Call. It sees "a dim prospect for any substantive appropriations work - aside from the child migrant supplemental - until after the November elections, or perhaps later. Many senior appropriators say they now see a 12-bill continuing resolution as a near inevitability."

Growers have 60 days to submit applications for compensation for fruit losses in 2012, the Agriculture Department said in the Federal Register. The payments will flow through the Noninsured Assistance Program, which provide protection similar to crop insurance for commodities not covered by catastrophic insurance.

Research into the grain, water and other material needed to produce food says that eating beef is 10 times more costly to the environment as other food derived from animals, such as pork or poultry, says the Weizmann Institute of Science, based in Israel. "Cattle require on average 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water, are responsible for releasing 5 times more greenhouse gases, and consume 6 times as much nitrogen, as eggs or poultry," says the Institute in a statement.

The Des Moines Register, the largest newspaper in Iowa, often the No 1 corn and soybean state, says, "Corporate America is fighting a losing battle over the GMO issue" against a right-to-know movement among consumers for labeling foods made with genetically modified organisms.

Scientists at the University of Basel have identified a gene regulatory switch that was key to evolutionary adaption of limbs in ungulates, a category of animals that includes cattle and pigs. “The fossil record shows that all animals with four limbs originally had five toes (digits),” said Carol Wicking of the University of Queensland, who took part in the study. About 55 million years ago, ungulates developed an even number of toes, or in the case of cattle, cloven hooves.

Crop conditions in Iowa and Illinois, the two biggest corn- and soybean-growing states, out-shine U.S. ratings in a year that seems headed for record harvests, said USDA data. The neighboring Midwestern states grew 31 percent of U.S. corn and 27 percent of U.S. soybeans last year, says USDA.

Farmers could see greater financial rewards by focusing on production costs than expanding the amount of land they operate, according to data from farms across Illinois, say three U-Illinois economists. Brandy Krapf, Dwight Raab and Bradley Zwilling compared the per-acre cost of seed, fertilizer, pesticides, equipment, fuel and utilities for three categories of farms - one group was 1,200-2,000 acres, another was 2,000-3,000 acres and the third was over 3,000 acres.

The Agriculture Department announced $9.7 million in emergency water assistance grants for 25 rural communities in California, now in its third year of drought. The grant program is aimed at communities suffering a significant decline in the volume or quality of drinking water. Some 75,000 people will be aided by the funds, said USDA.

"(F)ood and beverage companies have been a particularly hot target" for activists on social media, says Politico in a review of activities since the uproar over lean finely textured beef AKA pink slime. "Three of the top seven most popular petitions of all time on Change.org are about animal welfare in meat production, and more than two dozen food-related petitions have each earned tens of thousands of signatures, many of them hundreds of thousands."

The campaign in Iowa to succeed Democrat Tom Harkin, a Senate Agriculture Committee member, gained a lot of attention in the past week. Handicapping of the race ranged from "leans Democratic" to a toss-up. Over the weekend, the Washington Post's "Election Lab" said its model shows "78 percent chance of GOP win" - a much stronger reading than other forecasts.

The drought is propelling water prices to record levels, says the Vallejo (Calif) Times-Herald in recounting how prices have quadrupled or more. Water is, it says, "a commodity, like oil or gold, and its prices swing in response to supply and demand, geography and decisions out of Sacramento." So-called traded water is a small part of California consumption but the amount has grown greatly.

First Lady Michelle Obama rallied support for healthier school meals during a "kids state dinner" at the White House, saying to students and parents at the meal "you all have a right to expect that your hard-earned tax dollars will be spent on food that meets basic nutrition standards. It's as simple as that," she said in a transcript.

China would be allowed to ship apples to the United States under a regulation proposed by USDA's Animal and Plant Inspection Service. In a Federal Register notice, APHIS set a 60-day comment period. The proposed rule sets out safeguards against introduction of pests. For example, fruit from areas with Oriental fruit fly infestation must be fumigated and refrigerated as well as inspected.

It's field trip weekend for some of the students in a University of Illinois program that introduces people to fruit and vegetable farming. The program, offered at three sites around the state, is in its second year and has roughly 100 participants ranging from beginning farmers to crop farmers who want to diversify. "Our graduates are responding to the desire for local produce," says project manager Mary Hosier.

The Agriculture and Energy departments awarded a total of $12.6 in research grants to 10 projects, from Virginia to California, to improve to improve plant feedstocks for the production of biofuels, biopower, and biobased products. The work is part of developing non-food sources of biomass.

Bread wheat is a complex plant, with up to 124,000 genes, more than twice the number in rice, the other major food grain of the world. The vast number of genes made some researchers doubt if it is possible to map the genome - "to figure out how its genes are ordered so that specific traits can be more quickly identified. But a group made up of scientists, breeders and growers say that they’re more than halfway there and that an entire sequence is on the horizon," says the Washington Post.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission, the UN's food standards body, adopted a maximum allowable level for arsenic in rice of 0.2 milligrams per kilogram during a meeting in Geneva. Arsenic occurs naturally at high levels in soil and groundwater in some parts of the world. Rice, a staple food for hundreds of millions of people, absorbs more arsenic than other crops. Long term exposure can cause cancer and skin lesions as well as other ailments.

Besides overhauling the Nutrition Fact label on food packages, the FDA should mandate a summary of nutritional information on the front of the box, said former FDA commissioner David Kessler. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Kessler says such a label would list "the top three ingredients, the calorie count, and the number of additional ingredients...in bold, easy-to-read type."

Three years into one of the driest periods ever in California, the leading fruit and vegetable state, "there is not much more room for further deterioration, at least during the dry season," said the weekly Drought Monitor.