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.

Despite publicity about carbon sequestration as a potential source of revenue, only a handful of America's largest farmers and ranchers are pursuing carbon contracts, said Purdue University on Tuesday. Less than 1 percent of large-scale operators polled for the monthly Ag Economy Barometer said they had discussed carbon contracts with any company, compared to 2 percent in Purdue surveys earlier this year.

A new Senate bill would offer up to $150 million in loan guarantees to companies and nonprofit groups that help small and family-size foresters adopt climate-smart practices and sell carbon credits.

“In Teacapán, a small fishing village on the coast of Sinaloa, Mexico, Belen Delgado made a discovery that would change his life and the lives of everyone he knew,” reports Esther Honig in FERN’s latest story, in partnership with the podcast Snap Judgment.

Americans eat only a small number of sea creatures of seafood—namely salmon, shrimp and tilapia. But the world’s warming oceans are shifting undersea ecosystems in a way that will force us to expand our minds and palates, reports Ben Goldfarb in FERN's latest story, published with EatingWell.<strong>(No paywall)</strong>

Iowa is best known as the top corn-producing state in the nation, but a small and determined group of farmers is trying to chip away at that reputation by bringing back small grains like rye, oats, and triticale, Twilight Greenaway reports in FERN’s latest story, published in collaboration with Yale Environment 360.

The amount of U.S. acres in organic farmland increased 11 percent in 2016 from 2014 numbers to reach 4.1 million acres, says a report by the data-service company Mercaris. The individual number of organic farms also jumped in that period by 1,000, to 14,979. The increase is largely due to consumer demand and economics, Scott Shander, an economist at Mercaris, told Civil Eats.

With corn and soybean prices plummeting, and pressure to reduce runoff from fields mounting, some Iowa farmers are turning to oats as a possible solution to both problems, says Harvest Public Media.

U.S. farm exports are forecast by the USDA to hit a record $157 billion this year, aided by a weaker dollar against many foreign currencies. Agricultural lender CoBank says the impact will be somewhat uneven, with meat and dairy products benefiting the most.

The world's most populous country is already its largest meat-importing nation and "looks like it's poised to play a major role in meat markets in the future," said USDA senior economist Fred Gale on Thursday. China's imports of beef, pork, and poultry are projected by the USDA to grow 29 percent in the coming decade.

Large domestic hog production and low market prices will propel a larger share of U.S. pork onto the world market in 2019, according to USDA economists. In the monthly Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Outlook, they estimate more than 23 percent of pork production will be exported, up from 22.7 percent this year.

The USDA would work with farmers to reduce agricultural emissions of methane, said the White House in describing the domestic impact of the UN climate summit in Scotland. The United States also is a leader in the Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate, designed to accelerate breakthroughs in climate-smart farm production.

The second day of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) brought sweeping pledges to end deforestation and curb methane emissions. “This is a significant moment, like a ‘Paris moment’ for forests,” said Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Oxford.

A new report from the USDA found that while independent grocery stores outnumber chain grocers in rural areas, they account for a smaller percentage of grocery sales.

Instead of waiting for customers to walk through the door, "smart rural businesses are using the same omni channel tactics as big businesses," says Small Business Trends in listing eight rural and small town trends for the new year.

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.

The U.S. Department of Labor is charging Santiago Gonzalez, the owner of G Farms in El Mirage, Ariz., with housing roughly 70 Mexican workers in dangerous conditions and paying them below the legal minimum.

A coronavirus outbreak at the Farmer John pork processing plant in Los Angeles County that began nearly a year ago has been the focus of two state investigations. Cases at the Smithfield Foods-owned plant have more than doubled — with over 300 cases reported in January alone — as the county has become a Covid-19 epicenter, Leah Douglas and Georgia Gee report in FERN's latest story, produced in collaboration with the Covid-19 Reporting Project.

Tyson Foods said on Wednesday that it had fired seven management employees at its hog slaughter plant in Waterloo, Iowa, following allegations that plant manager Tom Hart had organized a betting pool over how many of the plant's employees would become ill with Covid-19.

Cities are creating jobs faster than rural areas with a 13.3 percent growth rate in the past year, compared to 4.8 percent in rural counties, says a Daily Yonder analysis of Labor Department statistics. "Unemployment remains a bigger problem in rural counties than metro areas," says the Yonder, which tried to gauge local conditions in battleground states.

More than 60 percent of Iowas live in the city, yet the state is commonly pictured as a land of farms, dotted with small, industrial cities.

In Brentwood, a "para-urban" community in Contra Costa County on the eastern outskirts of San Francisco, an amalgam of groups combines to keep 20,000 acres of farmland in production and out of subdivisions, office parks and strip malls, says Kristina Johnson at Civil Eats.

Proximity to an urban center may be key for maintaining rural population, say three Iowa State University researchers.

In Oregon, the self-proclaimed grass-seed capital of the world, a strain of genetically modified grass, developed by Scotts Miracle-Gro, has jumped the Snake River from test beds in Idaho and poses a risk to the $1-billion-a-year grass-seed industry, says the Portland Oregonian. Some growers and dealers "fear it's only a matter of time before the altered seed reaches the Willamette Valley, the heart of Oregon's grass business," a potential catastrophe.

The world's largest manufacturer of lawn and garden care products, Scotts Miracle-Gro, said it will "immediately begin to transition away from the use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides for outdoor use" sold under the Ortho brand name.

Seed companies such as Scotts Miracle-Gro and Cellectis Plant Sciences are utilizing techniques to genetically modify crops that are outside of federal jurisdiction or use methods that were not imagined when the regulations were created, said the New York Times.