One day after President-elect Donald Trump shot down a stopgap government funding bill, the House defeated a Trump-backed bill written by Republicans to keep the government running until March 14. The GOP bill included $31 billion to buffer the impact in rural America of natural disasters and lower farm income.

One fourth of the $99 billion in disaster aid requested by President Biden would be funneled through the USDA, with the bulk of the $24 billion devoted to offsetting lost crop production and reduced quality of crops. Agriculture deputy secretary Xochitl Torres Small was to testify in support of the request before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday.

Row crop and specialty crop growers are eligible for more than $3 billion from the Emergency Relief Program (ERP) to offset losses from natural disasters in 2022, said the USDA. Administrator Zach Ducheneaux of the Farm Services Agency said 2022 "was another year of weather-related challenges — for some, the third consecutive year or more in a row."

The government could save more than $2 billion a year if it replaced the public-private partnership of the crop insurance program with simpler and more tightly targeted disaster programs, said two agricultural economists. In an analysis for the American Enterprise Institute, Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith said a template for the less expensive program was the Pasture, Rangeland and Forage (PRF) insurance product offered by USDA.

What kind of produce you eat makes all the difference in your pesticide exposure, says a paper out by Consumer Reports. For example, “eating one serving of green beans from the U.S. is 200 times riskier than eating a serving of U.S.-grown broccoli.”

Shoppers should always buy organic peaches, strawberries, green beans and carrots to limit their exposure to pesticide residue, says Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports released consumption guidelines for consumer who want to reduce their exposure to inorganic arsenic in rice and again urged FDA to set standards for arsenic in rice-based foods.

Grocery chain Trader Joe's should help preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics by putting stricter standards on its meat suppliers, says Consumers Union.

In FERN's latest story, published with Fast Company, reporter Joe Fassler explains how Vow, an Australian startup, is reinventing lab-grown meat by ignoring chicken and beef and focusing on what CEO George Peppou calls "weird meat." <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

The USDA's meat safety agency aims to publish its proposed rule on cultivated meat labels this year, roughly three years after it asked consumers if names such as "steak" should be allowed, said a spokesperson on Wednesday.

The outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza that killed a record 58.8 million birds in domestic flocks and drove up egg prices in 2022 and early 2023 has faded during the summer months, said USDA data published on Monday. Only three outbreaks, totaling 1,860 birds, have been discovered since Memorial Day, according to USDA's online list of confirmed cases.

Researchers at Kansas State University have found pigweed that tolerates dicamba and 2,4-D, two herbicides that are often used to combat the invasive weed. Pigweed, or Palmer amaranth, is difficult for farmers to control, growing up to 10 feet tall and capable of producing 1 million seeds per plant.

Due to a procedural error on Tuesday, the Arkansas state plant board will re-vote on Friday on whether to temporarily ban use of the weedkiller dicamba, suspected of drifting out of cotton and soybean fields to damage neighboring crops, reported DTN. Some 167 complaints alleging misuse of the herbicide, mostly along the eastern edge of Arkansas, were filed with the state board as of midday Wednesday.

The Agriculture Department is taking applications from farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners for a share of a $2.2 billion fund to compensate victims of discrimination in USDA farm lending programs.

Researchers say the Global Positioning System, which helps drivers navigate the roads and which monitors tiny movements of the earth's surface as a possible indicator of developing earthquakes, has measured the huge loss of water due to severe drought in the West, says National Geographic.

Row-crop cultivators are being put to work because of the emergence of herbicide-resistant "super weeds," says DTN, "something of a renaissance" for mechanical weed control. Cultivators went into decline with adoption of limited-tillage and herbicides.

Payments totaling $235 million are being issued this week to producers hit by natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton in Florida, said the Agriculture Department. The payments make up the bulk of $375 million in spending announced for various USDA programs on Wednesday.

"Congress needs to take the plunge" in the new farm bill and "insist on conservation practices where it has, up until now, asked for cooperation while dangling a bit of cash," said the Des Moines Register, published in the No. 1 corn and hog state. USDA's soil and water conservation programs traditionally have relied on voluntary cooperation from farmers, aided by cost-sharing funds, but progress is unacceptably slow, said the newspaper in an editorial.

Earlier this year, when the USDA changed the vendor that runs its program that allows farmers markets to take SNAP benefits, it set off a chain reaction that could soon prevent thousands of poor people from using those benefits at the markets, reports FERN’s latest piece, published with The Washington Post. <strong>No paywall</strong>

The 8,000 free bananas that Amazon hands out every day are disrupting the banana business for local vendors. “The brainchild of CEO Jeff Bezos, there are now two stands on its corporate campus staffed with ‘banistas’ led by ‘bananagers’ who give out bananas to anyone and everyone nearby, whether that’s one banana for breakfast or a dozen,” says Consumerist.com.

Tom Colicchio, the restaurateur and lead judge on Top Chef, traces his interest in cooking from crabbing with his grandfather to his revelatory discovery of Jacques Pépin’s La Technique as a teenager. From there Colicchio went on to celebrity chefdom and later became a leader in food-policy reform. He describes this journey in FERN's latest piece, published as part of a special food issue with Switchyard, a new magazine from the University of Tulsa. 

Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio has resigned from the board of Food Policy Action, which he co-founded in 2012 as the lobbying arm of the food movement on U.S. food and ag policy. Colicchio said on Instagram that he would “continue to do the work of championing a more just and equitable food system in everything I do and from every platform available to me.”

Chef and food activist Tom Colicchio achieved celebrity on the TV show "Top Chef" and now is food correspondent for MSNBC.

Navigator CO2 said it canceled its 1,350-mile carbon pipeline because of "unpredictable ... regulatory and government processes" in the five Midwestern states the pipeline would cross. The Heartland Greenway pipeline was among three projects proposed to capture carbon dioxide, mainly from ethanol plants, and transport it through pipelines for injection thousands of feet underground.