Rod Snyder, the first director of EPA's agriculture and rural affairs office, said on Monday that he was leaving the agency after nearly three years as its agriculture adviser. EPA administrator Michael Regan said farmers, ranchers, and rural communities "will always have a seat at EPA's table" thanks to Snyder's influence.

The U.S. agricultural trade deficit was a record $17 billion in fiscal year 2023 and is certain to break records again this year, according to preliminary federal data released on Monday. The cumulative deficit totaled $15.2 billion at the end of May, with four months remaining in fiscal year 2024.

The USDA has approved the first open-air trial of a genetically modified non-sterile insect, male diamondback moths that pass along a gene during mating that prevents female offspring from reaching adulthood. The Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York said it "believes in the strongest terms that this action should trigger a full environmental review" by state officials, rather than a rubber-stamp approval.

Farmed salmon "may contain as little as half the amount of omega-3s than it did a decade ago," says a Civil Eats story that also appears at Time.

Cornell, Purdue, North Carolina and Colorado State universities will establish research centers on nutrition education and obesity prevention with $3.4 million in funding from the Agriculture Department.

Two crop specialists for Cornell Cooperative Extension have federal approval for an experiment of monitoring crops with a drone equipped with visual, thermal and multi-spectral cameras, says the Finger Lakes Times in Geneva, New York.

The budget package expected next week from Senate Republicans would convert the food-stamp program into something "similar to a block grant," says the Wall Street Journal, based on interviews with lawmakers and aides.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack indicated during an interview that he will not consider environmental sustainability during an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, said the Wall Street Journal.

Sam Kass, nutrition policy advisor at the White House and executive director of the Let's Move! initiative against childhood obesity, is leaving the White House, says the Wall Street Journal.

A large Chinese fishing company declared in a draft document "that it intended to circumvent international conservation limits on tuna – by simply ignoring them" with little fear of discipline for it, says the Guardian.

The government would set up five pilot projects to keep SNAP recipients from buying "unhealthy foods" under a provision in the USDA-FDA funding bill released on Monday. The House bill also would block the USDA from implementing three fair-play regulations on livestock marketing and refuse to pay for "President Biden's bureaucratic pay increases."

Legislation introduced in the House on Thursday would reform so-called “checkoff” programs, which impose mandatory taxes on producers of some commodities in order to fund promotional campaigns.

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.

Driven by "diablo" winds, massive wildfires burned hundreds of buildings, including three wineries, and tens of thousands of acres in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, reports the Wine Spectator. Dairy farms and produce growers with crops ripe for fall harvest also were in peril, "but moving farm animals is another story," said the San Francisco Chronicle.

More than 1,500 Hmong farmers have moved to Northern California’s Siskiyou County and now raise as much as $1 billion-worth of marijuana, according to some estimates. But locals haven’t been pleased to see the newcomers or their crop, which law enforcement destroys during raids, claiming that the pot is sold to the black market.

While the rest of the nation debates whether to allow industrial hemp farming, the Navajo Nation is already planning for the first crop. Some are hoping that the controversial plant will help bring money to Native American reservations, the same way that casinos have, says Reuters.

Ending a five-month hiatus, highly pathogenic avian influenza was confirmed in commercial flocks in two states — turkey farms in Utah and South Dakota — said the Agriculture Department. Some 58.97 million birds, mostly egg-laying chickens and turkeys being raised for human consumption, have died in bird flu outbreaks that began in February 2022.

In an appellate court order, the EPA agreed on Monday to decide by Aug. 15 if it would tighten water pollution standards for large livestock and poultry farms, a goal pursued for years by environmental groups. Only three in 10 of the largest factory farms are regulated at present, said Food and Water Watch.

New Jersey's Cory Booker, sponsor of bills to place a moratorium on large livestock farms and to expand Black ownership of farmland, is among five newcomers to the Senate Agriculture Committee, said panel leaders. The new members also include Republicans Roger Marshall and Tommy Tuberville, both of whom challenged President Biden's election on the same day a mob attacked the Capitol.

Cattle outnumber people 40 to one in Deaf Smith County in the Texas Panhandle, giving the county seat of Hereford its title as the "beef capital of the world." But the area is also a hotspot of citizen complaints about manure dust storms created when fierce winds hit feedlots housing tens of thousands of animals, according to FERN's latest story, written by Chris Collins and produced in collaboration with The Texas Observer and Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.<strong>(No paywall)</strong>

To help organic dairy farms survive in the Northeast, a first-of-its-kind partnership is asking consumers to pledge to buy dairy products from 35 brands that agreed to expand their purchases of milk from the farms. The Northeast Organic Family Farm Partnership was a response to decisions by processors to pull out of the region, said Gary Hirshberg, a co-founder of Stonyfield, on Wednesday.

Both Monsanto, the giant seed company, or Stonyfield Farm, the organic yogurt company, "have aggressively recruited academic researchers" to carry their banner in the tussle over labeling foods made with genetically modified organisms, says the New York Times.

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 Natural Resources Conservation Service is on a nationwide mission to train farmers to protect the microorganisms in soil—and their relationship to crops— instead of destroying them with fertilizer and chemical sprays, says an Orion Magazine story produced with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

House Democrats proposed on Monday a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package that included a one-year increase of SNAP benefits by 15 percent, $1 billion in payments to livestock and specialty crop producers, and a requirement for USDA to report to Congress in advance of major outlays.

More women are joining Maine’s lobster fleet, breaking down the old stereotype that women are just the fisherman’s wife. Last year, women held 434 of the state's 5,500-plus lobster licenses, hauling in a catch so physically demanding it has long been considered man's work, says NPR.

Forty percent of women working in fast food said they had experienced sexual harassment on the job, and 42 percent of those said they felt they had to accept the inappropriate treatment or else lose their jobs, according to a survey by Hart Research Associates.