Congress may be forced to keep the 2018 farm law in operation into the new year because of "disingenuous and misleading" arguments by Republicans that are preventing progress on its replacement, said Senate Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow. The new farm bill is nine months overdue so "it's time to get real," said Stabenow in a five-page statement.

The first Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on the 2023 farm bill will be held in Michigan on April 29, announced committee leaders on Wednesday. Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow has said field hearings in Michigan and Arkansas would begin the process of gathering ideas for the bill.

For the second year in a row, the number of monarch butteflies spending the winter in Mexican forests has declined, said Alejandro Del Mazo, Mexico's commissioner for protected areas.

Monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains are facing extinction, as the number wintering in California has plummeted by more than 90 percent since 1980, says a study published by the journal Biological Conservation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is debating whether to grant endangered species status to the insect.

Under terms of a settlement, the Interior Department will rule by June 30, 2019, whether the monarch butterfly, which has suffered a huge drop in population, deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act, said two environmental groups. The groups say without help, the well-known orange-and-black insect is at risk of extinction.

Two researchers at Cornell say the factors behind the decline in monarch butterfly populations are wider spread than the loss of milkweed, their summertime food source. They say the list includes sparse nectar sources in the fall, adverse weather and fragmentation of habitat.

Up to $7 million will be paid in bonuses to "team members who continue to produce food during the Covid-19 outbreak," said Hormel Foods on Thursday. The money will be paid in July to employees at Hormel's meat and processed food plants and would follow a $4 million bonus paid in April. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

FERN staff writer Leah Douglas has created a map of meatpacking and food processing plants where cases of Covid-19 have been reported. As of midday Wednesday, at least 11 meatpacking plants and two processed food plants have closed, and a total of 40 have reported cases of Covid-19. At least 1,950 workers are confirmed sick and at least 11 have died, the story says.<strong>(No paywall)</strong>

A series of emails obtained under a state freedom of information law suggest major food companies have a "roadmap for dealing with scientific challenges," says the leader of the nonprofit group U.S. Right to Know in a Bloomberg story. The emails by current and former Coca-Cola executives suggest actions such as enlisting outside organizations to question dietary advice that was contrary to their business interests.

There will be nearly two open jobs for every qualified graduate in the agriculture, food and natural resources sector in the next few years, says Harvest Public Media in summarizing a report by Purdue and the USDA. The gap between graduates and the estimated 60,000 jobs open annually for the next five years has "left the USDA, land grant universities and private industry scrambling to try and bridge the gap."

Karen Budd-Fallen, a Wyoming-based lawyer with a history of representing ranchers against the Bureau of Land Management, has announced that she’s in the running to be the BLM’s next director. With a long career of protecting private-property rights, Budd-Fallen, “has challenged grazing regulations and endangered species protections, and in a landmark case attempted to sue individual BLM employees under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.

On a 51-48 party-line vote, senators passed a resolution to revoke an Obama administration regulation intended to give the public more input into land management decisions by the Bureau of Land Management. The Republican majority said the rule, which covered 245 million acres of federal land under BLM control, gave outsiders too large a voice and diluted local input over decisions on how to use use land for grazing, recreation and energy and mineral development, said Reuters.

Rebuffed by the Senate last year, two U.S. representatives on Wednesday reintroduced their bipartisan bill to create legal status for undocumented farmworkers and to streamline the H-2A visa program for guestworkers.

House Republican leaders promised a vote this month on creating a new agricultural guestworker program. But it now appears that vote may be delayed, in part due to inter-party squabbling over more comprehensive immigration reform.

As a result of the Supreme Court decision on the upstream reach of antipollution laws, half of the water in U.S. rivers comes from so-called ephemeral streams that are now without federal protection, said researchers from the University of Massachusetts and Yale on Thursday.

Four of every 10 miles of U.S. rivers and streams are in poor condition because of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, said the EPA in its latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment.

Meat and poultry processing plants would reduce their emissions of water pollutants, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, by 100 million pounds annually under proposed wastewater rules, said the Environmental Protection Agency. It would be the first update of effluent limitation guidelines in a generation.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources on Thursday killed a proposal by a Norwegian-backed company to build two massive salmon farms in the middle of pristine Frenchman Bay, next to Acadia National Park. The decision ended a long-running saga that had generated considerable opposition in the community over fears that the farms would foul the water and ruin the local fishing and shellfish industries.

Makers of the insecticide chlorpyrifos will modify their product labels to reduce runoff and spray drift of the pesticide into the habitat of endangered species and to limit the areas of the country where the chemical is used, said the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday. The EPA also said it would propose a regulation limiting the use of chlorpyrifos to 11 crops.

U.S. district judge Lisa Wood issued a 17-state injunction on Monday against a Labor Department regulation that would allow farmworkers in the United States on H-2A visas to unionize. The National Council of Agricultural Employers said the injunction was a victory for U.S. farmers and ranchers.

In FERN's latest story, published with The New Republic, reporter Bryce Covert looks at the consequences for the current bird flu crisis of a 1976 congressional decision that undercut OSHA's ability to regulate the U.S. dairy industry.

States should open their stockpiles of personal protective equipment for distribution to farmworkers, with top priority for dairy farms where cows are infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus, said a Centers for Disease Control official. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department confirmed six additional cases of bird flu in cattle on Thursday, ending a 12-day pause in new cases.

Two years after an extremely dry winter led to restrictions on water use, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas is among the deepest on record, says the Los Angeles Times. An end-of-winter measurement by state snow survey chief Frank Gehrke found 94 inches of snow near the town of Phillips.

California is so big "[i]t has different droughts in different places," Jay Lund, an engineering professor at UC-Davis, told the Los Angeles Times. Rainfall in the northern Sierra Nevada, a water source for much of the state, is 180 percent of average so far in the wet season, but Southern California, which gets half of its water from local sources, is historically dry.

Snowmelt from the northern Sierra Nevada provides water for a large part of California during the warm months. An analysis by UCLA says that if greenhouse-gas emissions are not curbed, the snowpack that provides the water could be half its current size by the end of the century, reports public radio KPCC-FM in Pasadena.

A wetter fall has convinced California regulators to ease up on water restrictions for farmers and ranchers in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta and its watersheds, says Reuters. A foot of rain fell on the northern half of the state in October, making it the second wettest on record in the northern Sierra Nevadas. The south remained dry.

Fewer table eggs will be available for home consumption this year because of continuing outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza at U.S. egg farms this fall, said USDA economists, who estimated that table egg production this year would be 1 percent less than in 2023.

Although it remains high, the food inflation rate is one third lower than it was at the start of the year, the government said on Tuesday. The food inflation rate of 10.1 percent in January has tumbled to 6.7 percent on an annualized basis, according to the Consumer Price Index report.

The 9.9 percent food inflation rate of 2022 will be followed by a 7.1 percent rate this year, the highest rates in three decades, said USDA economists on Wednesday. Egg prices were forecast to rise 27 percent this year, on top of a 32 percent increase in 2022.

Wholesale egg prices are down more than $1 a dozen since hitting a record daily average price of $5.40 a dozen in the week before Christmas, said USDA economists in the monthly Livestock, Dairy and Poultry report.