Danielle Marvit, who could fairly be called the tomato maven of Pittsburgh, didn’t hesitate when asked to list her favorites among the dozens of tomato varieties sold as seedlings by Garden Dreams, an urban farm set between vacant Victorian-era houses in Wilkinsburg, Pa.

Better access to supermarkets and grocery stores doesn’t necessarily inspire people to eat better, according to a study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In fact, researchers found that U.S. adults buy most of their junk-food at such stores. The findings fly in the face of the “food desert” theory, which holds that people in neighborhoods without grocery stores are more likely to eat unhealthy food.

Taxes on sugary drinks are often credited with reducing soda consumption by making the sweet beverages more expensive. The taxes may actually have a much smaller impact on how consumers view the sodas, say the authors of a study on the "non-pecuniary (non-price) effects of sugar-sweetened beverage policies."

The Cook County Board, overseeing the 41 percent of Illinoisans who live in Chicago and nearby suburbs, is expected to repeal its 1-cent-per-ounce soda tax during a meeting today, only weeks after it took effect. The change of mind in Cook County, the largest jurisdiction in the nation to tax sugary beverages, is a dramatic defeat for public-health advocates.

Drug makers sold 11.1 million kilograms (24.5 million pounds) of antibiotics for use in cattle, hogs and poultry last year, up 6 percent from 2021, chiefly because of a large increase in sales of antimicrobials that are not considered medically important, said the FDA on Monday. Despite year-to-year fluctuations, like last year's increase, sales are much lower nowadays than before the FDA barred the use of antimicrobials to encourage weight gain in livestock.

The USDA’s acting chief scientist, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, has publicly criticized the World Health Organization’s updated recommendations for curbing antibiotic use on farms, citing poor science.

Tom Campbell, a Republican state senator in North Dakota, has announced that he’ll try to steal the U.S. Senate seat in 2018 from Heidi Heitkamp — the state’s sole Democrat in Congress. Heitkamp, who was considered for a role in President Trump’s cabinet, was both the first senator and the first Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee to endorse Sonny Perdue to lead the USDA.

Less than a week after the filing deadline for the special Senate election this year, the political action committee of the Alabama Farmers Federation endorsed appointed Sen. Luther Strange out of 19 candidates in the race.

More than nine out of 10 farmers are aware of carbon markets but only a fraction of them are participants, said a USDA report on Monday that listed several barriers, including a "limited return on investment as a result of high transaction costs." Carbon contracts have been promoted as a way for farmers to be paid for locking carbon into the soil as part of their day-to-day operations.

The Senate Agriculture Committee will vote on Thursday, Earth Day, on a retooled bill that would make it easier for farmers and foresters to earn money for locking carbon into the soil and trees, said chairwoman Debbie Stabenow. A sponsor of the legislation, Stabenow said language was strengthened to assure farmers, rather than investors or middlemen, receive the revenue for climate mitigation.

The two largest U.S. soil, water and wildlife conservation programs aimed at working lands are targeted for enhancements in legislation sponsored by Minnesota Representative Tim Walz, a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey found neonicotinoid insecticides in 74 percent of the water samples they analyzed from 10 major tributaries of the Great Lakes. The insecticides were "detected in every month sampled and five of the six target neonicotinoids were detected." Environmental Health News says the study "suggests the Great Lakes' fish, birds and entire ecosystems might be at risk" from the insecticides that are believed to be a factor in high mortality rates of honeybees.

Wild bumblebee queens exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides were 26 percent less likely to lay eggs than unexposed queens, says a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Two new farm-based studies have provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that neonicotinoid pesticides are harmful to domestic and wild bees.The first study, paid for in part by $3 million from Syngenta and Bayer and published in the journal Science, “took place at 33 large farmland sites spread across the UK, Germany and Hungary.

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).

This year's drought in Washington State "is by far the worst since 1977" and covers nearly all of the state, says Capital Press.

Harvest of fresh-market and processing tomatoes is under way in northern California with summer conditions favoring a good crop for growers who have access to enough water, says Capital Press, citing interviews with farmers.

A cattle rancher in central Washington State says he still believes his herd can co-exist with wolves despite losing a yearling Angus on state-owned grazing land, reports Capital Press.

Farmland in Iowa is worth an average $9,751 an acre – the highest value since Iowa State University began the annual survey in 1941. Values skyrocketed by 29 percent this year, fueled by high commodity prices, better than expected crop yields and large pandemic relief payments, said associate professor Wendong Zhang.

An Iowa State University survey said the average acre of Iowa farmland rose in value by 2 percent in 2017, to $7,326, ending the first three-year decline in values since the agricultural crisis of the mid-1980s.

Wendy Wintersteen is two days into her new job: president of Iowa State University. Wintersteen, who had been ISU’s dean of agriculture and life sciences, is the first woman to head the university of nearly 37,000 students in Ames, Iowa.

Half the seats in Midwest ag schools are filled by female students, but it’s the men in the classes who are likely to return home to run the farm. One communications teacher at Iowa State observed the difference first-hand when she assigned a film project and found that none of her female students planned on returning to manage their family’s farm, writes Harvest Public Media.

Colorado is the first state in the nation to require dairy farmers to submit a weekly sample of milk to be tested for the H5N1 avian flu virus — “the best next step” to protect its poultry and dairy industries from bird flu, said Maggie Baldwin, the state veterinarian.

A dairy herd in northwestern Iowa is infected with the H5N1 avian flu virus, said state agriculture secretary Mike Naig on Wednesday. He called on dairy and poultry farmers to “harden their biosecurity defenses” against the virus.

Eleven months after Californians approved "cage-free" Proposition 12 in a landslide vote, the meat industry asked a federal court in Los Angeles to overturn the referendum that guarantees farm animals more space to move about. The trade group North American Meat Institute says the referendum violates the Constitution, which puts the federal government in charge of interstate commerce.

Californians approved welfare standards for farm animals in a landslide on Tuesday. In Oregon and Washington State, voters delivered a split decision on measures affecting soda taxes. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

Animal welfare activists, led by the Humane Society of the United States, have filed papers in California to introduce an initiative that would make all eggs cage-free in the state by 2022. 

No doubt about it, animal-welfare activists have made the fate of chickens a mainstream concern, says the Washington Post. “In the past two years, nearly 200 U.S. companies — including every major grocery and fast-food chain — that together buy half of the 7 billion eggs laid monthly have pledged to use only cage-free eggs by 2025,” the Post notes.