James Hubbard, who retired as deputy chief of the Forest Service in 2017, is President Trump's choice to become agriculture undersecretary for natural resources, announced the White House. His primary job will be oversight of the Forest Service, with its 154 national forests and 20 grasslands on 193 million acres in 43 states and Puerto Rico.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that he supports the White House's proposal to cut his department's budget by $1.6 billion, saying "this is what a balanced budget looks like."

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."

A rainy December is putting water into California's depleted reservoirs and snowpack on the Sierra Nevada, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Stacy Dean, a key figure in U.S. public nutrition programs since the early days of the Biden administration, whose tenure included the lightning-rod increase of SNAP benefits in 2021, will leave USDA in mid-July. President Biden twice nominated Dean to serve as Agriculture undersecretary for nutrition but the nomination never advanced in the Senate.

To increase access to infant formula for low-income families enrolled in WIC, the Agriculture Department offered on Monday nationwide waivers to states to receive and distribute imported formula. The waivers were part of administration responses to formula shortages.

In FERN's latest story, published with Mother Jones, Bridget Huber explains how Maine is defining standards for allowable levels of PFAS in soil and food, while the federal government tiptoes around a growing national crisis.

Congress has voted repeatedly to constrain spending under the Conservation Stewardship Program, created to pay farmers to make soil and water conservation a part of their daily operations. University of Illinois associate professor Jonathan Coppess, writing at the farmdoc daily blog, said the "incredible shrinking of CSP ... may also serve as a warning" about stewardship funding in the 2023 farm bill.

Nine out of 10 farmers say they definitely or probably will stick with cover crops after the expiration of financial incentives to add the crops to their operations, said a report based on a survey of 795 farmers nationwide. Half of the participants in the National Cover Crop Survey said they had received some sort of payment for cover crops in 2022.

Ukrainian scientists say soil samples from the Kharkiv region show that “high concentrations of toxins such as mercury and arsenic from munitions and fuel are polluting the ground,” according to a Reuters report.

Arizona health officials said two workers employed at poultry farms have recovered from mild cases of bird flu while the public health agency in Marin County, north of San Francisco, said it was investigating a possible bird flu infection of a child. If confirmed by the CDC, the U.S. total for bird flu infections would rise to 61 people in eight states this year.

Four workers tested positive for the avian flu virus after culling chickens at an egg farm in southeastern Washington state — the first human cases reported in the Pacific Northwest. The diagnoses potentially raise the U.S. total to 31 since late March, though "the number of cases under investigation may change" as more people are tested, said the state Department of Health.

House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota and committee member Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey voted against the impeachment of President Trump on Wednesday.

On the same day that President Trump praised soon-to-be Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a straw poll of farmers gave Trump an approval rating of 82 percent, his highest tally yet.

A two-year study by University of California researchers says that hedgerows, the strips of vegetation along the edges of fields, take up so little space that they are not a shelter for rodents or a source of food-borne pathogens.

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.

“Four in 10 University of California students do not have a consistent source of high-quality, nutritious food,” says the Los Angeles Times, citing a recent survey of the state’s public university system. Of the 9,000 student respondents, 19 percent said they occasionally went hungry, while another 23 percent said they had enough money to eat, but didn’t always have access to high-quality, nutrient-dense foods.

After an E. coli outbreak in bagged spinach in 2006, growers in California's Central Coast were pressured to remove vegetation that bordered their fields as a way to keep out wildlife and prevent food contamination by pathogens.

As Rowan Jacobsen reports in FERN's latest story, published with Scientific American, research done over the last decade has made clear that "living shorelines" are far better at protecting the coastline from the devastating floods and tidal surges caused by the huge storms of the climate-change era than seawalls and other "armored" shorelines. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

The White House wants to cut funding 17 percent at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), one of the government’s chief resources for climate science, according to a budget memo from the Office of Management and Budget obtained by The Washington Post.

Lactalis, the biggest dairy company in France, has recalled over 7,000 tons of baby formula and powdered milk products across 80 countries, reports the New York Times. The recalls, which were implemented over the course of several weeks, amounted to one of the biggest such recalls in history. At least 38 children were sickened by salmonella found in the recalled products.

French shoppers will be able to tell at a glance if food products are healthy or not under a voluntary "Nutri Score" color code for food products, ranging from a dark green "A," for the best foods, to a red "E," for the worst, says Euractiv. The ministries of health, agriculture and economy jointly introduced the plan, saying it would allow nutritional value to be weighed as easily as price at the grocery store.

Ending a year-and-a-half of indecision, EU nations voted for a five-year extension of its license of glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world. Germany was pivotal in reaching the qualified majority – 55 percent of EU nations with at least 65 percent of EU population – for passage with France, the largest EU agricultural producer, opposing the extension, said online newspaper EU Observer.

France is open to phasing out use of the weedkiller glyphosate within its borders and will vote against a proposed 10-year EU license for the weedkiller, said Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. Reuters reported that Philippe asked the agriculture and environment ministries to propose by the end of this year "a plan to move away from glyphosate in light of current research and available alternatives for farmers."

Blaine Larsen Inc.—one of the largest potato growers in the country—must pay hundreds of farmworkers more than $1.3 million in back wages, after a Department of Labor investigation found it had systematically underpaid employees. It is at least the third time the DOL has investigated the company for labor violations in as many years.