The USDA announced a one-time change on Thursday to its rules on harvesting forage and grazing livestock on prevented-planting cropland. The move was meant to assure there will be enough livestock feed this year, particularly for dairy cattle.

Big bluestem grass — one of the most important forage grasses in the Midwest for cattle — is predicted to drop as much as 60 percent drop in stature and growth over the next 75 years due to climate change, according to a study published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Faced with prolonged and intensifying drought in the northern Plains, USDA opened a still-larger portion of the Conservation Reserve, ordinarily off-limits to farm work, to emergency haying and grazing. In its fourth announcement of permission for landowners to use the idled land for livestock forage, the USDA said haying and grazing would be permitted on wetlands and on buffer strips, often used to protect waterways from farm runoff, that are enrolled in the reserve.

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.

A trade group for U.S. sugar growers and processors, after objecting a week ago to a tentative U.S.–Mexico agreement on sweetener trade, said the pact was strengthened in follow-up negotiations and that it now supports the deal.

Agriculture Undersecretary Micheal Scuse asked the sugar industry at its summer meeting to support the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, reports DTN.

The Commerce Department says it will impose countervailing duties of 3-17 percent on sugar imported from Mexico following a preliminary ruling that Mexico unfairly subsidized its producers, said the Financial Times.

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.

With the Trump era dawning, "the most pressing work is to join forces with other progressive groups" to fight for social justice, say four leaders of the loosely aligned food movement in a commentary published by Civil Eats. "This means that important but parochial food issues, such as labeling of GMOs or the formulation of national nutrititional standards, are bound to be overshadowed as the larger fight for social justice becomes more urgent."

In the State of the Union address in January, President Barack Obama "should announce an executive order establishing a national policy for food, health and well-being," write Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Richardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter in an essay in the Washington Post.

Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, recounts the shortcomings of the food system in a commentary in Business Day, a South African newspaper: "(T)he ability of millions to...

Agricultural intensification and a lack of regulations drove a 78-percent increase in the farm sector’s ammonia emissions between 1980 and 2018, according to a paper published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. 

The method that farmers use to apply manure to their fields can affect emissions of greenhouse gases during the winter, say researchers from the University of Vermont. Their study, published in the Soil Science of America Journal, is one of the first to look at greenhouse gas emissions from Vermont farmland and highlights the consequences of different manure-spreading methods.

Days after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Des Moines Water Works against farm runoff, the City Council voted to support a bill in the Iowa House allowing regionalization of the water utility, said the Des Moines Register. The chief executive of the Water Works says the regionalization bill, sponsored by a legislator who is a hog farmer, is retaliation for the lawsuit, which wanted to apply water pollution laws to agricultural runoff.

The USDA gained “a significant increase” in its power to prevent fraud and protect the integrity of the National Organic Program with the publication of the Strengthening Organic Enforcement rule, said Agriculture Undersecretary Jenny Moffitt on Wednesday. The rule will take effect in 2024.

The largest update to the National Organic Program since its creation, the Strengthening Organic Enforcement rule, will be published as early as Wednesday, said The Packer. It said USDA confirmed on Tuesday that publication was imminent of the rule that has been under consideration since summer 2020.

For the first time, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was confirmed in Minnesota, the top turkey-producing state in the nation, said agricultural officials over the weekend. Some 14.6 million birds in domestic flocks have died of HPAI or in culling of infected herds to reduce the spread of the viral disease this year.

Two managers of a Florida farm-labor contracting company are going to federal prison for their role in a multi-state racketeering and human trafficking scheme. Between 2015 and 2017, federal prosecutors say, the company forced more than a dozen workers on H-2A visas to harvest crops against their will, while paying them less than they were owed. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she will work with fellow senators to give legal status to undocumented farmworkers and streamline the H-2A visa system for agricultural guestworkers. "It's time to give farmers the help they need and protect the essential workers who work hard to put food on our tables," said Feinstein, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

To aid farmers worried about an imminent labor shortage, two federal departments said on Thursday that they will help farms find foreign and domestic workers who may be eligible to transfer from one agricultural employer to another. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

The Idaho state Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would allow prison inmates to work in all parts of agriculture, an expansion of the 2014 law that authorized prison labor in businesses that produce perishable foods.

With the pandemic providing the impetus, the USDA made online shopping available to SNAP recipients in 49 states and the District of Columbia, with Alaska the only exception. Now researchers have found that online SNAP shoppers are far less likely to buy fresh produce, meat or seafood than if they went to supermarkets, but they also cut back on candy, cookies and cake, according to a new study.

State after state joined a USDA pilot program this spring that allows SNAP participants to buy groceries online as a way to reduce the chance of contracting Covid-19. But now, said a report released Thursday, SNAP shoppers face "an often manipulative and nontransparent grocery marketplace" when they shop via the internet. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

SNAP recipients in West Virginia, North Carolina and the District of Columbia soon will be able to purchase groceries online as part of a pilot initiated a year ago to test the idea, said the USDA. With the approvals, 39 percent of SNAP recipients are in a state that is part of the pilot. Interest in the pilot has risen with concerns about limiting exposure to the coronavirus.<strong>(No paywall)</strong>

Climate change is likely to reduce yields of major crops such as corn, wheat and rice on a large fraction of the world's cropland by mid-century, says a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham in Britain. "Large shifts in land-use patterns and crop choice will likely be necessary to sustain production growth rates and keep pace with demand," say the researchers in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Wild seaweed is becoming an increasingly popular food source and moneymaker across South America, says Take Part. Most of the region’s seaweed is gathered from the wild, rather than cultivated as it is other parts of the world, like Asia. Of Chile’s 30,000 wild harvesters, most are women.

The worldwide spike in food prices nearly a decade ago set off a land-buying surge by wealthy investors and nations wanting to shore up their food supply by acquiring cropland in developing nations. The surge was decried by critics as land grabs that would displace small farmers and herders. "The emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse," says the nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN).

Due to hotter weather and more days without rain, the length of forest fire season has grown by 19 percent over the past 35 years, says a team of researchers.

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.