When drought reduced streamflows and irrigation water allotments, growers in California's Central Valley pumped more water from their wells. Now a study by NASA and Stanford scientists says decades of overpumping permanently reduced the storage capacity of the aquifer beneath the valley by 336,000 to 606,000 acre-feet, which could exceed the capacity of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir that is the primary water supply for San Francisco.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would cancel four NASA climate science missions, which would have measured the flow of carbon dioxide and tracked long-term weather patterns. “Long before President Trump was elected, climate researchers have warned that the nation’s climate monitoring capabilities — which include satellites as well as air- and surface-based instruments — were less than adequate and faced data collection gaps and other uncertainties,” reports The New York Times.

Eight of the 12 months of 2016 were the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, helping to make 2016 the warmest year globally — the third record-setting year in a row, said NASA. "We don't expect record years every year but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear," said Gavin Schmidt, direct of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

New data from NASA satellites show that the wettest regions of the world are getting wetter, while drier regions are getting drier, reports The Desert Sun.

One day after President-elect Donald Trump shot down a stopgap government funding bill, the House defeated a Trump-backed bill written by Republicans to keep the government running until March 14. The GOP bill included $31 billion to buffer the impact in rural America of natural disasters and lower farm income.

President-elect Donald Trump called for a “streamlined spending bill” that also increases the federal debt ceiling on Wednesday as a replacement for the three-month government funding bill that congressional leaders produced the preceding day. That bill included $10 billion to offset a decline in farm income and $21 billion in disaster relief for agriculture.

A new partnership between the USDA and 31 states will “help lower food costs for American families while also giving farmers and ranchers more and better options,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at the White House on Wednesday.

The Agriculture Department will launch a $250-million-dollar grant program this summer to support "independent, innovative and sustainable" fertilizer production at home and to reduce reliance on imports. The USDA also said it would launch a public inquiry into concentration in the seed and agricultural input, fertilizer and retail markets.

Fundamental change in U.S. agricultural and rural policy is "an absolute necessity," said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday in calling for Teddy "Roosevelt-style trust-busting laws to stop monopolization of markets and break up massive agribusinesses." In a position paper, Sanders, pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, endorsed supply management — federal control over farm production — higher minimum prices for major commodities such as grain and milk and a return to a government-owned grain reserve "to alleviate the need for government subsidies and ensure we have a food supply in case of extreme weather events."

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.

The USDA will begin tests in Texas and Alabama of a toxic sodium nitrate bait to kill feral swine, said USDA's Wildlife Services, which combats invasive animals. More than 6 million wild pigs roam parts of at least 35 states and cause an estimated $190 million in crop damage annually, says the USDA.

Bible-quoting conservative firebrand Roy Moore handily defeated appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the runoff for the GOP nomination to complete the term of former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. The result guarantees turnover in Senate Agriculture Committee membership to replace Strange, a supporter of additional cotton subsidies, following the Dec. 12 general election.

The 357,000-member Alabama Farmers Federation, the largest farm group in the state, endorsed appointed Sen. Luther Strange four months ago and is standing by him for next Tuesday’s runoff election with Roy Moore, former chief justice of the state Supreme Court. President Trump is scheduled to hold a rally for Strange on Friday night in Huntsville, in northern Alabama.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.

California state agriculture officials ordered the recall of raw milk from a dairy farm in the Central Valley after tests found bird flu virus in a sample from the farm's bulk tank. The state Department of Food and Agriculture warned against consumption of milk from Valley Milk Simply Bottled on the grounds that it "may lead to infection with this rare, emerging flu virus." No illnesses were reported.

Arizona health officials said two workers employed at poultry farms have recovered from mild cases of bird flu while the public health agency in Marin County, north of San Francisco, said it was investigating a possible bird flu infection of a child. If confirmed by the CDC, the U.S. total for bird flu infections would rise to 61 people in eight states this year.

A Fresno dairy recalled all of its unpasteurized whole milk and cream products following “multiple bird flu detections in the company’s milk and dairy in the past week,” said the California Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the 32nd human case of bird flu in the state.

Congress put $2 million into a pilot program to address farmer stress and suicide this year, and a coalition of 43 rural and farm groups called today for full funding of the Farmers and Ranchers Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN). In a letter to senators and representatives overseeing the USDA budget, the groups proposed $10 million for fiscal 2020, which opens Oct. 1.

As milk prices continue to stay low, many dairy farmers are facing dire financial straits. Amidst growing concern about farmers’ mental health, Agri-Mark, one of the biggest dairy cooperatives in the country, delivered information about suicide hotlines along with its milk checks last week.

With the restaurant industry under fire for allegations of sexual misconduct and other gender-related problems, the James Beard Foundation, a leading supporter of the culinary arts, is overhauling its awards program to increase the diversity of the people and organizations it honors and the transparency of how it makes those decisions. 

A well-known cause of food-borne illness is the E. coli bacteria, usually associated with moist foods, such as meat or bagged salad leaves. In solving a food illness mystery of 2016, researchers determined that Shiga-producing E. coil bacteria can survive in raw flour, an arid host, according to an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Agriculture Department said it is launching reports on ethanol production and flour milling, three years after the Census Bureau ended the reports due to budget cuts.

Miller Milling Co, subsidiary of Tokyo-based Nisshin Flour Milling Inc, announced the purchase for $215 mln of four mills from Horizon and ConAgra that will turn Miller into the fourth-largest U.S. miller.

The Trump administration is imperiling access to safe and healthy food, throttling organic farmers and siding with meatpackers on livestock sales regulation, said the Food Policy Action Education Fund in a "State of the Plate" report. "This administration’s regulatory rollbacks, political appointments, and executive orders have affected everyone within our food system–from workers to producers to consumers," said Monica Mills, head of the group.

In one of USDA's biggest decisions in the Trump era, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue killed the so-called GIPSA rule on fair play in livestock marketing. Two months later, the farm group Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) filed suit in the U.S. appeals court in St. Louis for reinstatement of the rule, issued in the closing weeks of the Obama administration.

Pointing to the tens of thousands of salmonella illnesses linked to poultry products each year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Tuesday that the USDA would mobilize "a stronger and more comprehensive effort" to reduce the risk of the disease-causing bacteria in raw poultry meat. The process could include pilot projects that encourage "pre-harvest controls" on the farm, an area not directly under USDA jurisdiction.

Congress may need to intervene to assure the high-level coordination of food safety efforts, said the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday in a report listing three dozen “high-risk” areas throughout the government.

Poultry processors will soon be able to ask the USDA’s meat safety agency for permission to run slaughter lines at up to 175 birds per minute, an increase from the current limit of 140 birds.

The world's largest meat company, JBS, entwined in a corruption scandal in its home country of Brazil, hired as its global food security Al Almanza, who just retired as head of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. The Organization for Competitive Markets, which focuses on agricultural antitrust issues, called the hiring "the latest of the scandalous job swapping between government and the meat industry."