Last week, the Ag Insider reported AgSec Vilsack's comments on working with a nonprofit group on a potential mentoring project for beginning farmers.

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.

Researchers are developing a new strain of genetically modified rice that contains much higher levels of iron and zinc, says the University of Melbourne. "This has the potential to reduce chronic malnutrition disorders that can be caused by an over-reliance on rice in the human diet," says the university.

Only three countries show no serious signs of malnutrition: China, Vietnam and South Korea, according to the 2016 Global Nutrition Report. The rest of the world is plagued by such poor nutrition indicators as “stunted toddlers, anemic young women and obese adults,” says The New York Times. In the United States, each obese family member costs families an average of 8 percent of their income in additional healthcare.

"Anti-hunger advocates worry that the nation may be approaching a 'hunger cliff,' as some states are ending emergency SNAP benefits even as demand at food pantries—and Covid case numbers—are rising again," writes Bridget Huber in FERN's latest story.

Nearly 13.6 million students are now receiving free breakfast and lunch through the community eligibility program, a federal initiative that has previously been targeted for cuts by Republicans, according to a new report. That figure is a 14-percent increase in the past year alone.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has reversed plans to transfer control of the National Bison Range to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When tribes called for the change in 2016, they claimed the federal government had taken the land from American Indians without their consent.

One of the largest cullings in a decade is planned for the bison herd at Yellowstone National Park, says Reuters. Plans call for animals that stray outside the park boundaries to be targets for hunters and for the animals to be herded to tribal land for slaughter.

Nearly hunted to extinction in the late 1800s, the North American bison is now the national mammal, thanks to President Obama's signature to enact HR 2908, the National Bison Legacy Act. The new law declares the woolly, 2,000-pound bison "a historical symbol of the United States."

The bison will soon join the bald eagle as America’s national animal—and its only mammal, says The Guardian.

Meat processor JBS said all of its plants were fully operational on Thursday, four days after a ransomware attack shut down cattle slaughter plants in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Less than a day's worth of production was lost during the attack, the company said.

The fast-growing weed Palmer amaranth has developed a tolerance for dicamba herbicide in least five counties in western Tennessee and likely several others, said University of Tennessee weed specialist Larry Steckel on Monday. The report was a setback for dicamba, which was introduced a few years ago as a new tool for control of invasive weeds that showed resistance to glyphosate and other weedkillers.

Three-dozen consumer groups and businesses asked the USDA to tighten its regulation of crops containing genetically modified organisms as part of an overhaul of its regulatory system, said Reuters.

A panel of two dozen scientists begins a week-long meeting today in Lyon, France, to "analyze scientific findings regarding links between cancer in humans and the herbicide known as 2,4-D," says Reuters.

Herbicide-resistant "super weeds" are a threat to adoption of conservation tillage in the South, says Southeast Farm Press. In its story, a USDA weed scientist says hundreds of thousands of conservation tillage acres are at risk of...

A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry.

At the start of the pandemic, food delivery apps, including the 'Big 3' — Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash — were hailed as saviors, facilitating a takeout boom meant to keep restaurants and their staffs working. But eateries were quickly confronted by a harsh reality: These Silicon Valley and Wall Street–backed firms, which together dominate 93 percent of the market share nationwide, are designed to scrape money out of local businesses and send it to shareholders. Now, in cities around the country, restaurant owners are fighting back, forming local-delivery co-ops in an attempt to drive the third-party interlopers out.

John Wooden High School, a so-called continuation school in the Los Angeles school system, is small, operating without a pool or a gym but it has a farm. And most days, Alex Snyder, 17, "eats lunch with a pot-bellied pig named Peanut," says the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles County Fair Assn formed in 1940 "to promote the region's then-booming agriculture industry," says the Los Angeles Times. "But over the years, it morphed into something resembling a conglomerate with little connection to farming or livestock. And its managers have become richly compensated even as the association loses money."

The Palo Verde Irrigation District, headquartered in Blythe, "has become an increasingly important factor in California's struggle to overcome a four-year drought," says the Los Angeles Times.

Small-scale urban farmers in drought-stricken California are finding creative ways to keep plants alive without wasting water, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Chile’s groundbreaking nutrition regulations, which prohibit food companies from marketing unhealthy foods to kids and require stop-sign-shaped labels on sugary, salty, and fatty foods, did not reduce obesity rates among elementary and high school students in a lasting way, according to a new study.

French shoppers will be able to tell at a glance if food products are healthy or not under a voluntary "Nutri Score" color code for food products, ranging from a dark green "A," for the best foods, to a red "E," for the worst, says Euractiv. The ministries of health, agriculture and economy jointly introduced the plan, saying it would allow nutritional value to be weighed as easily as price at the grocery store.

The FDA is assessing whether 26 ingredients count as fiber on nutrition facts labels. “If you're a nutrition-label reader, the list includes some familiar-ish sounding ingredients — such as inulin, which is often sourced from chicory root,” says NPR. “Other ingredients on the 'do-these-count-as-fiber?' list include gum acacia, bamboo fiber, retrograded corn starch, and — get ready for the tongue-twister — xylooligosaccharides. Some of these fibers are extracted from plant sources, while others are synthetic.”

The Democratic leader on the Senate Health Committee wrote FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb to complain of an unreasonable delay in updating the Nutrition Facts label that appears on every package of food.