President-elect Donald Trump, who recently told an interviewer, “I won on groceries,” said in a Time magazine transcript released on Thursday, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” Meanwhile, a Purdue University poll found that consumers have lowered their expectations for food inflation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will head the Department of Health and Human Services in the new administration, said President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health,” said Trump in announcing the nomination.

U.S. corn exports are climbing for the third year in a row and will be the fourth largest on record this trade year, thanks to the mammoth crop now being harvested and falling market prices, said the Agriculture Department on Thursday. The 15.2 billion-bushel crop would be just a hair smaller than the record set last year.

The world has added 398 million harvested acres of food grains, feed grains, and oilseeds since the start of the 21st century, mostly in tropical nations, said four analysts writing at the farmdoc daily blog. “Only with significant changes in its production technology” would U.S. agriculture, accustomed to being a world leader in row crops, benefit from this expansion, they said.

Sharply lower prices for palm, sunflower and soybean oils helped pull down the Food Price Index marginally from its record high that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Grain prices also fell during April while meat, dairy and sugar prices rose.

The typical Midwestern grain farm could generate more than twice as much income this year as in 2019, thanks to higher market prices and large federal payments, said two University of Illinois analysts. The outlook for the new year is much more dour, especially without new stopgap payments.

The largest U.S. grain processor, ADM, is pursuing a takeover of Bunge, another of the giants of the grain trade that collectively are known as ABCD — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, an unnamed source told Reuters. Due to low prices engendered by a string of bumper crops worldwide, margins are tight in the grain trade.

Grain prices will run at or near decade lows, keeping farm income in a slump, say Purdue agricultural economists. In the Purdue Agricultural Economics Report 2017, they say the average value of farmland in Indiana was $7,041 an acre, down by 13 percent from the 2013 peak because of weakness in the farm sector.

The world's largest farm equipment maker, Deere and Co., expects sales of its agricultural equipment to decline by 5-10 percent globally in the year ahead due to lower demand for big machinery. "Lingering trade tensions coupled with a year of difficult growing and harvesting conditions have caused many farmers to become cautious about making major investments in new equipment," said chief executive John May.

Analysts predict that John Deere will raise its profit forecasts for the year on Friday, despite a dismal year for crop prices. Bloomberg reports that a possible reason for the company’s rising profits could be the mechanical needs of large, consolidated mega-farms.

The food-stamp cuts proposed by the House Budget Committee, if implemented, could force states to cut enrollment by 10 mln people or to reduce benefits by $40 a month, says the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The fiscal 2015 budget resolution proposed by House Budget chairman Paul Ryan again calls for converting food stamps to a block grant program run by states.

A coronavirus outbreak at the Farmer John pork processing plant in Los Angeles County that began nearly a year ago has been the focus of two state investigations. Cases at the Smithfield Foods-owned plant have more than doubled — with over 300 cases reported in January alone — as the county has become a Covid-19 epicenter, Leah Douglas and Georgia Gee report in FERN's latest story, produced in collaboration with the Covid-19 Reporting Project.

For more than a year, chicken has been a rare item in Los Angeles public school cafeterias, reflecting the school board's policy to hold vendors responsible for animal and worker welfare among other things and the challenge of finding enough food for the nation's second-largest school system. The Los Angeles Times says chicken tenders, patties and frankfurters will be back as soon as May now that three new vendors are under contract.

The Los Angeles school board voted, 6-1, to loosen its ban, dating from 2011, on sugary, flavored milk in lunchrooms, in the hopes that more relaxed rules will reduce food waste and encourage consumption of plain milk, says the Los Angeles Times. "We wouldn't serve caramel apples to increase apple consumption," objected Brent Walmsley, founder of the advocacy group Sugarwatch.

The 45Z tax credit, intended to encourage the development of sustainable aviation fuel and other low-carbon fuels, would be available until 2034 and limited to domestic feedstocks under companion bills filed in the House and Senate on Tuesday. Farm groups said the legislation would allow time for domestic production to rise while discouraging a flood of imported oil, grease, and tallow.

Far more people on social media support free meals for all public school students than oppose it, 43 percent vs. 3 percent, according to an analysis by Impact Social, an online monitoring company, in collaboration with the food policy publication Food Fix.

School food directors overwhelmingly say they have trouble acquiring nutritious foods and meal supplies due to supply chain disruptions, according to a survey released by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) on Wednesday. The SNA said the results underscored the need for regulatory relief and increased funding from the USDA for the upcoming 2022/23 school year.

The anti-GMO group Center for Food Safety filed suit against the USDA to force release of a study on the impact of using digital disclosures such as QR codes to identify foods made with GMO ingredients. "In the United States, there has never been a food labeling requirement met by QR codes," says the center, which prefers a written label on food packages.

An international team of researchers has mapped the “jumping genes,” formally named transposable elements, or transposons, in corn, says UC-Davis. “The discovery could ultimately benefit the breeding and production of maize, one of the world’s most important crops.”

The University of California has turned to the U.S. appeals court based in Washington, D.C., in a dispute with the Broad Institute over who owns the patents for the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR, says The Verge. "This means the heated battle over who owns one of the most revolutionary biotech inventions of our time will likely continue for months or even years from now," the report says.

Rice tends to absorb arsenic from the soil more readily than other food crops, prompting concern about the presence of the chemical in baby food. "Scientists have identified enzymes that help rice plant roots tame arsenic, converting it into a form that can be pushed back into the soil," thereby reducing the threat to humans, says Science News.