With drought throughout much of the U.S. West, the Forest Service will temporarily stop its use of prescribed burns and conduct a 90-day review of the practice, said Chief Randy Moore. The Forest Service has identified an escaped prescribed fire as the cause of the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, reported the news and opinion site Wildfire Today.

“A growing movement of scientists, land management agencies, conservation organizations, and indigenous groups is working to return fire to fire-adapted ecosystems, including forests and grasslands, throughout the U.S.,” writes Gabriel Popkin in FERN's latest story, published with Yale Environment 360.

The government will deploy 15,000 firefighters, 1,600 engines, and 625 aircraft against what is expected to be another dangerous year for wildfires, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday.

Nearly two dozen senators co-sponsored a bill that would exempt an estimated 100,000 large livestock farms from reporting emissions from manure and other animal waste. Sponsors include the leaders of the Senate committee that would handle the bill.

Beginning on Wednesday, from 60,000 to 100,000 livestock and poultry operations will be required to report emissions of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide, said Drovers. The EPA previously exempted livestock farms from filing the reports but a federal court, in response to a lawsuit filed by environmentalists, vitiated the exemption.

A first-of-its-kind study lays out, on a county-by-county basis, the environmental impact of growing corn in the United States, offering the industry an unprecedented tool for improving sustainability along its supply chain.

The Swiss company Climeworks says it’s the first to develop a “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant” that can suck the greenhouse gas directly out of the air. It’s the kind of solution, some experts say, that is imperative given the dire pace of climate change.

Sub-Saharan Africa will likely need to boost food imports or expand its farmland if it is going to feed a population expected to increase 2.5-fold by 2050, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The other option – increasing yields on current farmland to reach self-sufficiency – should be pursued but is likely to fall short.

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.

The U.S. and China, the world’s largest agricultural producers, pose the greatest threat to other countries when it comes to spreading invasive pests and pathogens, according to a new report led by an international team and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The developing world, and sub-Saharan Africa specifically, is the most vulnerable to the economic damage such species can inflict.

Malawi is facing a food crisis as the southern Africa region wrestles with drought and high temperatures. Due to record high winter temperatures hitting southern Africa during planting season, Malawi’s corn production fell by 12 percent in April leaving the country short of 1 million tonnes of grain during its worst food crisis in a decade, The East African said.

What you eat depends largely on where you live, despite the year-round cornucopia of food made available by international trade, says a team of biologists and economists.

Americans buy more food, in terms of calories, after the year-end holidays than during the holiday season, often maligned as a period of over-indulgence, says a study in PLOS ONE, according to Feedstuffs.

A ban on vending machines in schools can lead to increased soda and fast-food consumption if its the only change in a school's food policy, say researchers at the UI-Chicago.

An ever-larger share of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve will be devoted to grasslands — nearly 4 of every 10 acres — with the results of this year's signup for the long-term land stewardship program, said the Agriculture Department on Monday. With the new enrollments, the Conservation Reserve is near the 27-million-acre limit set by the 2018 farm law.

Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity in the new farm bill to remodel the land-idling Conservation Reserve to focus on small tracts that merit attention and to encourage carbon capture on grasslands, said a farm policy expert on Monday. The reserve was created in 1985 to retire entire fields or even farms of fragile land from crop production, but those "general" enrollments have fallen steeply since 2007.

In the absence of federal guidance on the use of pesticides, the nine states that have legalized cannabis for commercial use are building a patchwork of regulatory polices in an effort to ensure that the end product is safe for consumers, reports the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Driven by "diablo" winds, massive wildfires burned hundreds of buildings, including three wineries, and tens of thousands of acres in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, reports the Wine Spectator. Dairy farms and produce growers with crops ripe for fall harvest also were in peril, "but moving farm animals is another story," said the San Francisco Chronicle.

For more than 40 years, the Emerald Triangle — "a densely forested region of labyrinthine back roads, secret valleys, and perennial creeks in Northern California" — has been a great place to grow a prohibited but highly desired product: marijuana. But this area is now coming under massive pressure with the state's legalization of recreational weed, reports Stett Holbrook in FERN’s latest story, published with GRIST, “The high price of cheap weed.”

The synthetic pesticides and fertilizers used illegally to grow marijuana in national forests produce far more pollution than previously thought, says Reuters. "Thousands of acres" of national forest in California are "waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the hospital."

The tech-investment firm SoftBank Vision Fund says it will spend $200 million to help the indoor farming startup Plenty expand around the globe. Currently the company has two farms, one in San Francisco and another in Laramie, Wyoming, but it wants to scale up, tapping into population centers around the world.

In Manhattan, Whole Foods' latest store offers customers a “produce butcher” to cut up vegetables in real time — and for a price. According to the store’s sign, the produce butcher will “julienne (long, thin matchsticks), mince, dice, chop, and slice” produce for a dollar a pound, says Modern Farmer.

The Trump administration "lost the trade war" with China, said Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, on Wednesday during a debate with Vice President Mike Pence, who faulted her for voting against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It was the first time agriculture was mentioned in the pre-election debates.

Extolled as a defense against erosion and nutrient loss during fallow seasons, cover crops are being planted on a larger portion of U.S. cropland than before, said USDA economists. Plantings expanded 50 percent in a five-year period, but still only 5 percent of cropland is sown with them—and incentive payments are an important factor in adoption of the practice.

In a survey of over 800 farmers and ranchers across five states, the Center for Rural Affairs found overwhelming support for the farm bill's Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). The Nebraska-based organization, which advocates for environmental stewardship and rural communities, concluded that the CSP should continue to exist and be funded as a standalone farm-bill initiative.

At a campaign stop in Michigan, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said on Wednesday, “We’re going to fire the agriculture secretary, right? She’s not doing a very good job.” Vance seemed to confuse the energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2010, with Tom Vilsack, who is serving his third term as agriculture secretary.

Former president Donald Trump won 60 percent of the rural vote in Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses, well above his statewide total of 51 percent. But his victory Monday in the first-in-the-nation test of voter support for presidential candidates was built on the vote in towns, where most Iowans live, said a Daily Yonder analysis.

Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois and Andy Harris of Maryland were part of the Republican bloc voting repeatedly against elevating Kevin McCarthy to House Speaker. Harris was the senior Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee in charge of USDA and FDA spending, and Miller served on the House Agriculture Committee in the past session of Congress.

Two Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee, Reps. Tom O’Halleran of Arizona and Cindy Axne of Iowa, are in uphill fights for re-election against Republicans, according to political handicapper Sabato’s Crystal Ball.