The farm bill "isn't dead yet," said Georgia Rep. David Scott, the senior Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, on Monday, although time is running out for Congress to act this year. A spokesman said the senior Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, was talking to "anyone he can to discuss how we can move the ball forward."

The U.S. appetite for meat continues to grow. Ten years ago, Americans consumed an average of 200 pounds of meat per person annually. This year, it will be a record 227.6 pounds, thanks to larger pork and poultry supplies, before ebbing next year.

Facing a record number of applications for clean energy funding, the USDA said it would hire 40 Climate Change Fellows to speed up the disbursal of $2 billion through its Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). The $2 billion was part of the 2022 climate, healthcare, and tax law.

The Interior Department would auction off millions of acres of public land for oil and gas development, according to a draft obtained by The Nation of the department's strategic plan for the next five years. "It states that the DOI is committed to achieving 'American energy dominance' through the exploitation of 'vast amounts' of untapped energy reserves on public lands."

The Inspector General has launched an investigation into Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s air travel, after complaints that Zinke was using a private plane owned by an oil executive. That particular flight, from Las Vegas to Zinke’s home state of Montana, cost taxpayers $12,000, according to the Washington Post.  But other taxpayer-funded flights, including one to speak at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, are also being questioned.

Researchers at the University of Southern California are in the early stages of an experiment to farm seaweed for biofuel in the Pacific Ocean. Kelp can grow two to three feet a day without fertilizer, pesticides, fresh water, or arable land — making it an ideal product for the biofuel industry.

In the first decision under the new North America trade pact, a three-judge dispute settlement panel ruled that Canada had manipulated its tariff-rate quotas to limit imports of U.S. dairy products, despite agreeing to greater U.S. access in the 2020 agreement. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the ruling was a signal of U.S. resolve against unjustified trade restrictions anywhere.

President Trump led a 37-minute celebration of the new NAFTA on Wednesday, signing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on the White House lawn during a ceremony packed with laudatory descriptions of the “very, very special” tri-national free trade agreement.

Poultry processors would be barred from making deductions from the base prices that they list in contracts with growers under a rule proposed by the Agriculture Department on Monday. The USDA said the proposal aims to curb abuses of the so-called tournament system that determines a farmer's revenue and processors' demands for growers to make additional investments in their facilities.

The outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza that killed a record 58.8 million birds in domestic flocks and drove up egg prices in 2022 and early 2023 has faded during the summer months, said USDA data published on Monday. Only three outbreaks, totaling 1,860 birds, have been discovered since Memorial Day, according to USDA's online list of confirmed cases.

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.

The harvest in Kenya is likely to coincide with the arrival of a new generation of desert locusts to attack the crops, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Locusts also are swarming in Ethiopia and Somalia, said the FAO.

Swarms of food-devouring desert locusts threaten food security for nearly 10 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, said the Food Security and Nutrition Working Group on Monday, describing the infestations as the worst in 25 years in Ethiopia and in 70 years in Kenya. The group, which focuses on central and eastern Africa, said the locust upsurge threatens the coming agricultural season.

Infestations of the Desert locust have been found on the southern coast of Yemen, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, describing the insects as a force of nature when the adults gather in swarms that ride with the wind. "A very small swarm eats the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people," says FAO.

Georgia, the No. 2 cotton state, lost one-third of its crop to Hurricane Michael, said the USDA on Thursday in lowering its estimate of the total U.S. harvest by 7 percent because of storm damage in the Southeast.

As Hurricane Michael made landfall Wednesday, farmers in the Southeast were still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Florence just weeks ago.

In FERN’s latest story, in partnership with The New York Times, reporter Ted Genoways explains how Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, is taking the fight to Republicans in rural America.

Approaching her 60th birthday, Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, announced she will retire in 2022 after 10 years in the House. "It will be a new decade and I feel it's time for a new voice," said Bustos. Her decision also reflected the shrinking influence of the farm and industrial heartland in the House.

First-term Rep. John Rose, declaring it was “absolutely, without a doubt, wrong” to pass a $19.1-billion disaster relief bill without a roll call vote, blocked House action on Thursday on the legislation, which includes $3 billion for agricultural aid.

Texas is easily the largest cattle state in the country, with 12.3 million head, or nearly one of every seven head in the U.S. inventory of 93.6 million cattle. The 54 Texas counties declared a disaster area due to damage by Hurricane Harvey hold 1.2 million beef cows, the animals that are the foundation of the cattle industry, says livestock economist David Anderson of Texas A&M.

Cornell University scientists found "tantalizing evidence" that generations of a vegetarian diet led to a mutation in the human genome that may make people "more susceptible to inflammation, and by association, increase risk of heart disease and colon cancer," says the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Two meta-analyses of research on organic milk and meat say the products contain 50 percent more omega-3 fatty acids than conventionally produced meat and milk, reports the New York Times. "However, the question of whether these differences are likely to translate to better health in people who eat organic meat and drink organic milk is sharply disputed."

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.