The USDA would be barred from allowing faster line speeds at hog and poultry slaughter plants during the pandemic under companion bills filed in the House and Senate on Thursday. Sponsors said the legislation would protect worker safety.

The State Water Resources Board proposed a $1.5 million fine against the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District in northern California for "unauthorized diversion and use of water," the first such action against a senior rights holder, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Five water districts sued California's State Water Resources Board over its decision to ban senior water rights holders from drawing water out of rivers and streams in the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds, said the Sacramento Bee.

A state survey shows a 30-percent drop in the population of breeding waterfowl in California in one year due to drought and poor habitat, says the Sacramento Bee.

State regulators have reduced water discharge from Lake Shasta in Northern California in hopes of boosting the survival rate of juvenile fish threatened with extinction, says the Sacramento Bee.

Farmers are expected to plant an estimated 86.5 million acres of soybeans this year, up 3 percent from last year, and dial back their corn acreage by 5 percent and their wheat acreage by 4 percent, according to the USDA’s annual Prospective Plantings report, released Thursday.

Farmers are harvesting the largest U.S. corn crop ever grown, 15.2 billion bushels, and only the third crop on record to top 15 billion bushels, said the Agriculture Department.

U.S. cotton growers will harvest a drought-shortened crop of 12.57 million bales, their smallest since 2009, according to the USDA's monthly Crop Production report. Texas, the No. 1 producer, would account for nearly all of the nearly 5-million-bale decline in production from last year.

Thanks to a huge decline in the Florida crop this season, California is running neck and neck with the Sunshine State as the top orange-producing state with the harvest season in its final weeks, said the USDA. California has expanded production in recent years while output in Florida, hit by the tree-killing citrus greening disease, has fallen steeply over the past two decades.

General Mills is teaming up with the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation nonprofit, to help save pollinators, says The Guardian. The food manufacturer, which has contributed $4 million to other pollinator conservation projects since 2011,says it will give $2 million to the Xerces-led program to make 100,000 acres of North American farmland pollinator-friendly over the next five years.

President-elect Donald Trump's lineup for agency heads is comprised of people who have deeply opposed the policies of President Obama on social programs, public lands, the environment, labor issues, and veterans affairs, says The New York Times.

Mexican drug cartels, operating illegal marijuana farms on public lands, are polluting forests and saddling the federal government with millions of dollars in clean-up costs. Trespass marijuana farms are thought to number in the hundreds of thousands in California alone. The sites “wreak havoc on the land, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of pounds of garbage, leaching caustic chemicals, polluting watersheds, and damaging the habitat of endangered and at-risk species,” reports High Country News.

The Interior Department would auction off millions of acres of public land for oil and gas development, according to a draft obtained by The Nation of the department's strategic plan for the next five years. "It states that the DOI is committed to achieving 'American energy dominance' through the exploitation of 'vast amounts' of untapped energy reserves on public lands."

The first trial of three in the case against Cliven Bundy — a Nevada rancher who organized an armed standoff against the federal government — and his followers has been deemed a mistrial after the jury failed to reach consensus on all but two defendants after five days of deliberations. A new trial will begin on June 26.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has introduced a bill in Congress to amend the Antiquities Act, which grants U.S. presidents the right to create national monuments. Last month, President Obama designated 1.35 million acres under the act in Utah and another 300,000 acres in Nevada, bringing his total to nearly 538 million acres, more than any other president.

The MacArthur Foundation awarded “genius” grants this year to A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist who is developing a wildfire forecasting model after studying climate change and tree mortality, and Lucy Hutyra, an environmental ecologist whose studies show that conserving urban forest fragments helps mitigate local impacts of climate change.

The White House announced the creation Wednesday of the American Climate Corps to train 20,000 young adults for work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience. At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the Forest Corps, operating through the U.S. Forest Service, would be the first major interagency partnership with the Climate Corps.

Continuing a four-year trend, land values rose during the growing season in the northern Plains, despite financial tightening in the farm sector, said ag bankers in a quarterly survey by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

Springtime increases in corn, soybean, and wheat prices brightened the outlook for the agricultural sector amid expectations of lower farm income this year than in 2023, said Federal Reserve regional banks in the Beige Book report on Wednesday. The Chicago and Dallas banks said the discovery of bird flu in dairy cattle was a cause for concern.

For the first time since 2001, interest rates are rising faster than farmland values, creating a potential obstacle to land purchasers, said assistant economist Ty Kreitman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. “With interest costs now above average land value appreciation, farm operating profits will determine the magnitude of returns for financed land,” he said.

High commodity prices and low interest rates fueled a sharp 15 percent increase in the value of cropland in the Midwest and Plains in the third quarter, according to surveys of ag bankers by four regional Federal Reserve banks. "Alongside prospects for further strength in commodity markets, the outlook for farm finances and agricultural land values through the end of 2021 remained strong," said a summary of the surveys.

Swarms of food-devouring desert locusts threaten food security for nearly 10 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, said the Food Security and Nutrition Working Group on Monday, describing the infestations as the worst in 25 years in Ethiopia and in 70 years in Kenya. The group, which focuses on central and eastern Africa, said the locust upsurge threatens the coming agricultural season.

Nearly one-fifth of Ethiopia is in need of food aid, as a punishing drought kills off livestock in areas where people — especially pregnant women and children — rely on milk for nutrition, Reuters says.

The food security situation in Ethiopia is worsening, says the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and as the main growing season approaches, 10.2 million people are affected by successive crop failures and livestock deaths caused by drought since 2015.

Thanks to a generally favorable growing season, wheat growers in the European Union reaped a record 160 million tonnes of the grain in 2015, part of a record-setting harvest worldwide.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has vaulted into the top tier of Democrats under consideration by the Hillary Clinton campaign for nomination as vice president, said Politico. The Hagstrom Report, meanwhile, cited a source close to the Clinton campaign as saying Vilsack was under serious consideration.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton is likely to campaign with her choice for vice president in Florida on Saturday, said the New York Times, listing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack among the four men still under consideration for the job. Former president Bill Clinton "has privately expressed his support for Sen. Tim Kaine," said the newspaper.

It's the political murmur with legs — the idea of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack as running mate for Hillary Clinton, the presumption Democratic nominee for president. In the latest whisper, Vilsack is among 21 vice-presidential "possibilities," including two other members of the Obama cabinet, listed by the political website Sabato's Crystal Ball.

Following the recommendation of a team of experts, the Agriculture Department said on Tuesday it would allow six pork processing plants to operate high-speed slaughter lines for an additional 90 days in an experiment that began two years ago. The test was intended to generate information on the impact of higher line speeds on worker safety, but the team of experts said there was not enough data yet.

The USDA's food safety agency is considering new approaches to reduce salmonella bacteria in poultry that could include "pre-harvest interventions" on the farm, said Agriculture Deputy Undersecretary Saundra Eskin on Tuesday. "We know that most salmonella contamination enters the facility with the birds and the more we can do to reduce contamination at the point of slaughter, the less contamination and cross-contamination we have in an establishment."