The ivory-billed woodpecker, America's largest woodpecker, with a 31-inch wingspan, is extinct, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ending years of lingering hopes that the "Lord God Bird" had survived deep in southern bottomland forests. The ivory-bill was one of 23 species declared extinct on Wednesday, 11 of them birds.

The Interior and Commerce departments said they will rescind or revise five Trump-era regulations that reduced federal protections for endangered and threatened species. The replacement rules would give the same protection to threatened species as endangered ones, and would instruct the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Services to disregard economic impacts when deciding whether a species should go on the endangered list.

Growers in the Klamath Basin, in the Pacific Northwest, will receive the smallest amount of water ever from the federal government due to unrelenting drought, said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Wednesday. The water will be available around June 1, weeks later than usual.

Three decades ago, a bird census counted fewer than 400 Kirtland's warblers, a small, golden-chested songbird that nests in young jack pine forests in the upper Midwest. On Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the bird from the endangered species list, pointing to a remarkable recovery in population due to work by government, conservationists, land owners and charities.

Shakuntala Thilsted, who spent years proving, and then promoting, the value of fish grown in backyard ponds to improve the diets of poor families in Asia and Africa, was the 2021 winner of the $250,000 World Food, the sponsoring foundation announced on Tuesday. In Bangladesh, her pond-polyculture approach supports 18 million people and turned the nation into the world's fifth-largest aquaculture producer.

The annual World Food Prize conference opens today in Des Moines, providing a setting for Purdue to launch its post-harvest initiative against food waste. The initiative is a bundle of projects to prevent food loss after harvest, improve nutrition, support food entrepreneurs and build agricultural value chains, says the university.

The government will deploy 15,000 firefighters, 1,600 engines, and 625 aircraft against what is expected to be another dangerous year for wildfires, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday.

Wildfires have burned 6.51 million acres so far this year, with 51 large fires active in 11 states this weekend, says the National Interagency Fire Center.

Rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the amount of nutrients in staple crops such as rice and wheat, say researchers at Harvard's public health school. As a consequence, more than 1 billion women and children would lose a large amount of their dietary iron intake and be at larger risk of anemia and other diseases.

Philippines officials are considering a request for a biosafety permit for so-called golden rice, which would allow use of the vitamin A-enriched GMO rice as food or feed and for processing, says the Cornell Alliance for Science. The biosafety permit would allow researchers to conduct human nutrition studies, the alliance said during the summer, and an application to allow cultivation of the rice in the Philippines "will be submitted in the future."

Rather than launch its rulemaking process, the EPA said on Tuesday it would appoint a panel to study, over the next year or so, the best ways to reduce polluted runoff from factory farms. Environmental group Food and Water Watch (FWW) said the "deeply flawed response amounts to yet more delay" in development of stricter water-pollution standards for large livestock and poultry farms.

Following the first shipments of U.S. beef to China in 14 years, the U.S. Dairy Export Council says the United States and China have signed a memorandum of understanding “on dairy trade assurances that will allow more exports from the United States.” At the same time, a consumer group said the United States should not allow China to ship poultry products to America.

A U.S. court of appeals overturned a lower court ruling and blocked the disclosure of ownership information about concentrated animal feeding operations, Agri-Pulse reported. The appeals court determined that the EPA had violated the Freedom of Information Act by releasing personal information, including phone numbers and email addresses, of CAFOs.

Few major achievements are expected during a fence-mending visit by Brazil president Dilma Rousseff to the United States this week, including a bilateral meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, says McClatchy.

A three-day lightning tour of the spring wheat crop in the northern Plains points to the lowest average yield in nine years, “a sign of the intense drought conditions plaguing much of the western Dakotas this year,” said DTN. Crop scouts checked 496 fields and saw a “high number of abandoned fields in the western counties, many of which had been cut and baled for hay” because the wheat was not worth harvesting.

Faced with prolonged and intensifying drought in the northern Plains, USDA opened a still-larger portion of the Conservation Reserve, ordinarily off-limits to farm work, to emergency haying and grazing. In its fourth announcement of permission for landowners to use the idled land for livestock forage, the USDA said haying and grazing would be permitted on wetlands and on buffer strips, often used to protect waterways from farm runoff, that are enrolled in the reserve.

The world coffee crop is up marginally from last year to a total of 150 million bags weighing 60 kg apiece, boosted by record-setting harvests in Indonesia and Honduras, said the USDA's semi-annual Coffee: World Markets and Trade report.

Colombia, the third-largest coffee grower in the world, will harvest 13 million bags of Arabica beans in the coming season, its largest crop in two decades.

Coffee production is on the rise in Colombia and Central America, where growers battle the rust fungus, said USDA in its Coffee: World Markets and Trade report.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that far from being a healthy drink, "Fruit juice has no essential role in healthy, balanced diets of children." American children between the ages of 2 and 18 consume almost half their fruit intake in the form of juice, but doctors warn that has to stop.

The USDA announced today that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack will continue his campaign for reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, otherwise known as the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, with a speech at the National Press Club on September 8.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo say babies given foods high in sugar, fat and protein in their early months of life are more likely to eat less nutritious foods later in life.

Schools across Britain will see an additional 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion) for sports from a tax on sugary beverages that will be imposed beginning in April 2018, said Phillip Hammond, chancellor of exchequer, in laying out the proposed government budget. The tax was announced last March as step toward better public health through lower rates of obesity, diabetes and tooth decay, said the Independent.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation donated $500,000 to the city of Philadelphia to fight the beverage industry, which sued after voters passed a soda tax last November, says Philadelphia Business Journal.

The newest locality to approve a tax on sugary beverages is also the largest — Cook County, home to 5.2 million people including the city of Chicago. The Cook County Board approved the 1-cent-per-ounce tax on a 9-8 vote with board president Toni Preckwinkle breaking a tie, said the Chicago Tribune.