The world may be near the breaking point as global warming inflicts drought, intense storms, and heat waves on more and more people, said Pope Francis on Wednesday, calling for a worldwide commitment to reining in human-caused damage to the environment.

PARIS – Due to an initiative launched by France, there is now an international framework that for the first time brings agricultural soils into climate negotiations. Called “4 per 1000,” this new proposal aims to protect and increase carbon stocks in soil.

At the Paris climate negotiations, authorities are starting to pay attention to agriculture as a way to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Food production accounts for about one-third of all emissions, yet prior climate conferences have focused almost exclusively on energy production systems such power plants. In an interview, Hans Herren, who co-chaired the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development—nicknamed the IPCC report for agriculture—in 2008, spoke about agro-ecology as a climate mitigator.

Food security and agriculture should be at the center of the debate at the UN climate change conference later this year, said the head of FAO and the French agriculture minister. "We believe that agriculture in the broad sense - including forestry, fisheries and aquaculture - can and must play a central role in addressing climate change, particularly in adapting its impacts, such as water scarcity, soil salinity or increasing pests and diseases of plants and animals," said FAO director general Graziano da Silva.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.

The USDA sent $23 billion in trade war payments to more than a half million farming operations, with the lion's share of the aid going to row-crop producers, said the Government Accountability Office on Thursday. Historically underserved farmers received less than 4 percent of the money.

Textile mills and specialty crops will get three-fourths of the $330 million announced by the USDA on Tuesday in a broad-ranging program to help producers and the food supply chain recover from the financial impacts of the pandemic. In addition, the package earmarked $75 million in grants to help low-income Americans buy fruits and vegetables.

With Americans spending more of their food dollars at the supermarket, the specialty crop sector will continue to adapt to the pandemic and the loss of food-service sales in the new year, said agricultural lender CoBank. "Steep financial losses from the loss of food service contracts will ultimately result in the rationalization of some processing assets and production acreage."

More than 500 people from the U.S. to Thailand have sent their sourdough bread starters to be analyzed by microbiologist as part of the Sourdough Project, led by biologist Rob Dunn at North Carolina State University. “The project is trying to answer many questions,” says NPR. “How does a starter's microbial ecosystem vary with different flours? How does a new starter compare with one that's 200 years old, filled with tradition and lore? Do they change with geography, as some claim? And, of course, how can you bake a more delicious loaf?”

The popularity of artisanal bakeries and craft brewers has led to a scramble for high-quality grain, says Eater. At the moment, distilleries have fatter wallets and are steadier customers than bakers . "Is there enough grain to go around?"

At a laboratory nicknamed the Bread Lab, researcher Stephen Jones, who looks like "a lovably geeky high school teacher,” is trying to re-invent bread, "the most important food in history," says a New York Times Magazine story.

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 holding company Icahn Enterprises was subpoenaed for information about its founder’s attempts to change U.S. biofuel policy while he was an informal White House advisor, reported Bloomberg.

The EPA rejected a petition by oil refiners to relieve them of the responsibility for blending biofuels into gasoline and diesel fuel, "dealing a blow to billionaire investor Carl Icahn and oil companies that had sought the change," reports Bloomberg. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told farm-state lawmakers a few weeks ago that the agency was unlikely to change the "point of obligation," based on its preliminary analyses.

Billionaire Carl Icahn has been an informal White House adviser on regulatory issues since the early days of the Trump administration. Five Democratic senators asked EPA chief Scott Pruitt for all documents involving any communications involving Icahn and his businesses and the EPA, which regulates air pollution laws and biofuel usage.

With a letter to President Trump, two dozen senators, mainly from the Midwest, stepped into a dispute that recently fractured the unity of ethanol trade groups. Spearheaded by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the letter asks the president to keep petroleum refiners responsible for compliance with the Renewable Fuels Standard, which requires use of biofuels in the gasoline supply.

The member nations of the EU voted for a near-total ban of neonicotinoid insecticides, over the objections of farmers and pesticide manufacturers. Known as neonics, the chemicals are the most widely used class of insecticides in the world and have been linked by scientific studies to the decline in honeybees and other pollinators, said BBC News.

The European Commission is considering draft regulations to ban the mostly widely used insecticides in fields across Europe in order to protect bees, according to documents obtained by The Guardian via the Pesticide Action Network Europe. A vote is expected this May; if passed the ban could take effect within months.

The head of Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is not only a climate-change skeptic. He also has a history of discouraging pesticide regulations, writes Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, pointing to Ebell's role as the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Queen honeybees fed syrup laced with the pesticide imidacloprid laid significantly fewer eggs—between a third and two-thirds as many—than unexposed bees, according to a report in EurekAlert on a new study published in the journal Science Reports.

In remote northwestern Brazil, a group of farmers has set up a co-op that plants native fruit trees on exhausted former ranchland. In the process, the farmers are not only reforesting the area in a way that mimics the natural habitat, they’re earning about five times more per acre from their agroforestry plots annually than local ranchers are earning by clearing the forest to graze their cattle, says FERN's latest story, produced with National Geographic. <strong> (No paywall) </strong>

In an effort to save money and better serve their brand image, some major companies are breaking from third-party certifiers, such as FairTrade and the Rainforest Alliance, and developing their own schemes for certifying which products meet standards of sustainability and ethics, reports Reuters. 

Ralph Lauren Corp. joins a growing number of fashion companies that have pledged to not use products derived from cleared forests or that required grabbing land from indigenous people, says Reuters. The company says it has new plans to track its sourcing and avoid parts of the world that practice extreme deforestation and human rights abuses.

By large, bipartisan majorities, the House passed bills on Wednesday to introduce more transparency in cattle marketing and to keep in force a law that requires meatpackers to report purchase prices of livestock. The bills now go to the Senate for action.

The USDA will launch two new cattle pricing reports next week that "will bring needed clarity to the marketplace," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday. The reports, which will provide more information on prices for cattle sold through the major channels, were greeted as a significant step toward transparency in an often-opaque market.

A watchdog group gave the bay and its watershed a health grade of D+ for water pollution, habitat, and fisheries on Thursday, the same as its last assessment in 2020. “Overall, the unchanged score is largely the result of failures to make needed changes on farmland to reduce pollution,” said the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

With three years left to meet the goals of a “pollution diet,” the three major states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed have greatly improved their wastewater treatment, though they still lag in three other areas, including reducing agricultural runoff, said the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

In a new report, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation calls on farms in the bay’s watershed to “urgently accelerate and scale up” their conservation efforts, not only to reduce water-borne pollution — a federal mandate — but to slash their greenhouse gas emissions and stoke local economies.