A power cooperative based in the Denver suburbs that supplies electricity to more than a million consumers in the West will receive $2.5 billion in USDA grants and loans for a mammoth solar, wind, and battery energy project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will announce on Friday.

Local governments have imposed at least 2,600 restrictions on wind and solar power projects in their jurisdictions, with local opposition seeming to rise with the size of the project, said a USDA report on wind and solar development in rural areas. Wind and solar projects had a combined footprint of 423,974 acres in 2020, or 0.05 percent of the nation's 870 million acres of farmland, said the four economists who wrote the report.

For the most part, farmers put their cropland to more intense use rather than convert forests and grasslands because of demand for biofuels in recent years, says a study by the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.

Increasingly, veterinarians prefer to practice in cities rather than rural areas, says a paper at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.

The Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State Univ releases a report on crop insurance selection by growers.

The harvest in Kenya is likely to coincide with the arrival of a new generation of desert locusts to attack the crops, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Locusts also are swarming in Ethiopia and Somalia, said the FAO.

Fast-growing Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to 4 million people, is sprawling ever-further into the countryside and "gobbling up chunks of pastureland," says the New York Times. The result is a "growing clan of metropolitan herders" who graze their cattle and goats along four-lane highways, on the lawns of wealthy homeowners or in cemeteries.

In Gazi Bay, Kenya, a carbon-credit program is saving mangrove forests by encouraging fishermen to cash in instead of cutting down trees. As part of the Mikoko Pamoja (Mangroves Together) program, “[l]ocal people who are protecting and replanting mangroves are now selling 3,000 tonnes of carbon credits a year to international buyers, for about $5-$6 a tonne," says Reuters.

Malawi is facing a food crisis as the southern Africa region wrestles with drought and high temperatures. Due to record high winter temperatures hitting southern Africa during planting season, Malawi’s corn production fell by 12 percent in April leaving the country short of 1 million tonnes of grain during its worst food crisis in a decade, The East African said.

When "USDA" and "co-location of offices" appear in the same sentence, it usually means there's a proposal to consolidate USDA's local operations, particularly crop subsidy and land stewardship, into the same building. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue talked about co-location at the Iowa Ag Summit, but he meant a central location for handling permits from the USDA, Interior Department and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, reports Agri-Pulse.

California farmer John Duarte, the poster boy for farm groups complaining of federal over-regulation of wetlands, has high-powered supporters in Congress who are appealing for the government to drop its long-running case against him. The Republican chairmen of the House Agriculture and Judiciary committees wrote Attorney General Jeff Sessions to argue that the case against Duarte is unfounded.

The shipping season is ending early on the upper reaches of the Mississippi River because ice is making navigation difficult. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the towboat Mary K Cavarra passed through Lock and Dam 2 near Hastings, Minn, on Thursday.

Corn and soybean growers in the Midwest face nearly $480 an acre in fixed costs and land rent going into the planting season, and hundreds of dollars more in per-acre expenses for the so-called variable costs of producing a crop, says economist Brent Gloy.

Around the world, people are drinking less orange juice, with consumption down one-fifth in the past decade to roughly 1.9 million tonnes this year. Production, dominated by Brazil and the United States, peaked five years ago and has generally declined since.

This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. As Gabriel Popkin writes in FERN’s latest story, published with Yale Environment 360, “The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road over the same period.”

Over a 10-year period, conservation tillage became the most popular tillage practice on U.S. cropland, said a USDA agency on Thursday. The Natural Resources Conservation Service said the practice, which leaves crop residue on at least 30 percent of the soil surface to reduce erosion, had been adopted on 53.4 million acres by the mid-2010s.

Midwestern farmers, seeking to expand their crop lands, are destroying millions of trees that helped protect the region's soil after the catastrophic Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The removal of these trees is expected to worsen the impact of a drought that could come as climate warms the region, says Carson Vaughn in FERN’s story with Weather.com.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow Republicans to expect a floor vote this month on a bill to release more water from federal projects to farmers and communities in the West by reducing the amounts guaranteed for wildlife.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left Italy after a few hours of a two-day meeting of environment ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy industrialized nations.

During the last day of the G-7 summit in Italy, President Trump tweeted that he’ll decide later this week whether the U.S. will stay in the Paris Agreement, says the Los Angeles Times. The agreement, signed by almost 200 countries, including the U.S. under President Obama, calls for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. It's widely supported by the other G-7 countries: Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Japan.

The leaders of the Group of Seven major advanced nations, meeting in Germany, said, "As part of a broad effort involving our partner countries, and international actors, and as a significant contribution to the post-2015 development agenda, we aim to lift 500 million people in developing countries out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030."

There is almost no risk that the United States will exceed WTO limits on agricultural subsidies with the 2014 farm law, but the picture could be far different if Doha Round proposals are adopted, according to three senior economists.

The first edition of the revived Fats and Oils: Oilseed Crushings, Production, Consumption and Stocks report was delayed for two months, until Oct. 1, because of inadequate response by processors, said the USDA.

The FDA order to foodmakers to phase out artificial trans fats "will create opportunities for Canada's canola sector, especially high oleic varieties," says Commodity News Service Canada.

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.