In Central America's Dry Corridor, a historically drought-prone region that stretches from Mexico to Panama and is home to 10.5 million people, climate change is producing longer and more frequent dry spells and forcing a growing number of farmers to attempt to migrate to the U.S., according to FERN's latest story, published with The Weather Channel. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

According to NASA data, 2017 was the second-hottest year on record, or the hottest year without an El Niño weather pattern, which drives up temperatures in the short term.

An area the size of New Zealand, some 29.7 million hectares (73.4 million acres), was stripped of tree cover during 2016, says data on Global Forest Watch, an increase of 51 percent from the previous year. "Forest fires seem to be a primary cause for this year's spike, including dramatic fire-related degradation in Brazil," wrote two World Resources Institute analysts in a blog.

The food chain off the coast of California is starting too look shorter and less diverse thanks to environmental events like El Niño and potentially climate change, say scientists who tracked the diets of dolphins.

After steep increases due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the global hunger total of as many as 783 million people is relatively stable and the goal of ending hunger by the end of the decade will be increasingly difficult to reach, said the annual United Nations report on world hunger.

The Champions 12.3 coalition, dedicated to the UN goal of halving food loss and waste by 2030, said on Tuesday it would begin a series of assemblies in October to encourage countries and companies to step up their efforts to reach that goal. More than one-third of food produced in the world is lost or wasted each year.

The USDA would offer at least $75 million a year for the development of regionally adapted plant seeds and livestock breeds at public universities under a bill filed by five senators. Sponsors said regional diversity would make the U.S. food chain more resilient and more productive.

A new poll and report from the Konkurrenz Group found that the vast majority of farmers disapprove of the proposed merger between Bayer and Monsanto. Nearly a thousand farmers, from 48 states, responded to the poll.

Celebrated New York chef Ban Barber is launching a seed company that unites the interests of chefs with the capabilities of plant breeders, reports the Washington Post in a story produced in partnership with FERN. Row 7 Seed Co "hopes to develop new varieties driven by flavor and nutrition that have a chance to make it in the wider marketplace."

The Pima County Public Library system was one of the first in the nation in 2012 when it began to circulate seeds, says High Country News, an approach patterned on the traditional lending library that makes available to readers. "Aspiring gardeners can look up varieties electronically, put seeds on reserve and check out 10 packs at a time."

Half a century after the 1965 grape strike, Cesar Chavez is the most familiar face of the farmworker movement, says KQED in a story by Lisa Morehouse that calls attention to the pivotal role of Filipino-Americans, led by Larry Itliong, who actually started the strike in Delano, in the Central Valley.

Jutta Thoerner is an outspoken advocate of the age-old practice of dry-farming - relying only on rain water, California's four-year drought notwithstanding, says public broadcaster KQED.

Two co-founders of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis "calculate that the chances of another winter with below-average precipitation to be nearly three in four" for California, says the science blog at KQED in San Francisco.

Under the terms of an agreement announced Wednesday, seed and agribusiness giant Bayer will pay up to $10.9 billion to resolve lawsuits that accuse its Roundup herbicide of causing cancer, and an additional $400 million to settle litigation claiming crop damage caused by its dicamba weedkiller from 2015 to 2020.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected an emergency motion for an immediate cutoff of farmer use of the weedkiller dicamba, a victory for the EPA plan to allow spraying of the herbicide on GE soybeans and cotton through July 31. The court voided EPA approval of versions of dicamba sold by Bayer, BASF and Corteva on June 3; a few days later, the EPA said farmers could use stocks already on the farm through the end of July.

The victors in a lawsuit against the weedkiller dicamba asked the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn an EPA decision that would let farmers use the herbicide until July 31. "Emergency relief is required to prevent off-field drift harms that will occur on millions of acres should spraying continue," said the coalition of farm and environmental groups in an emergency petition.

Despite having the support of the Senate Agriculture Committee, two Biden nominees to the Agriculture Department must wait until mid-November, at the earliest, for a Senate vote.

U.S. agriculture is running the risk of becoming overly reliant on large exports to China just over a year after Washington and Beijing de-escalated their trade war, said the head of the Farm Credit Administration on Wednesday.

The House passed, on an overwhelming 330-99 roll call on Wednesday, a bill that overrides USDA regulations to allow schools to serve whole milk as part of the school lunch program. “Let’s end the war on milk,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

The USDA would receive nearly $90 billion through the "build back better" bill to mitigate climate change, reduce the risk of wildfires, provide debt relief for economically distressed farmers, and encourage rural economic growth, said the House Agriculture Committee on Wednesday.

The member nations of the EU voted for a near-total ban of neonicotinoid insecticides, over the objections of farmers and pesticide manufacturers. Known as neonics, the chemicals are the most widely used class of insecticides in the world and have been linked by scientific studies to the decline in honeybees and other pollinators, said BBC News.

The European Commission is considering draft regulations to ban the mostly widely used insecticides in fields across Europe in order to protect bees, according to documents obtained by The Guardian via the Pesticide Action Network Europe. A vote is expected this May; if passed the ban could take effect within months.

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).

Queen honeybees fed syrup laced with the pesticide imidacloprid laid significantly fewer eggs—between a third and two-thirds as many—than unexposed bees, according to a report in EurekAlert on a new study published in the journal Science Reports.