Two dozen environmental and consumer groups, including the Sierra Club and Government Accountability Project, petitioned the EPA on Tuesday to regulate large dairy and hog operations under federal air pollution laws. "The EPA has the duty and authority to regulate these methane super-emitters under the Clean Air Act as part of the administration's larger strategy to prevent catastrophic and irreversible climate change," said the groups.

Environmental groups, long seen as second-tier players in electoral politics, are gaining attention for activism and spending on mid-term races for Congress, says Politico.

A novel conservation group in western Borneo offers healthcare services and training in sustainable farming to curb illegal logging. In the process, the group may have come up with a blueprint to stop diseases from making the deadly leap between wildlife and people, Brian Barth writes in FERN's latest story produced with Popular Science. <strong> (No paywall) </strong>

Forest fires burned 1.64 million hectares across seven provinces of Indonesia this year, with peatlands accounting for 41 percent of the area lost to flames, said the Center for International Forestry Research on Monday. The figures, based on satellite data, show that only a portion of the the fires could be attributed to direct land-clearing work for palm oil plantations.

Former congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke unveiled a $5-trillion climate plan Tuesday that calls for reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and includes a number of agricultural initiatives to reduce and mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions on farms and deal with extreme weather events.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren announced her public lands policy platform on Monday, which includes an end to new fossil fuel drilling leases and an expansion of renewable energy production. Meanwhile, candidate Bernie Sanders said he supports imposing a moratorium on agribusiness mergers.

"Big Food and Ag" has donated more heavily, by almost a 2-1 margin, to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton than Republican nominee Donald Trump, says Mother Jones, although Trump began catching up in August when his electoral prospects brightened.

The Clinton campaign loads up on Domino’s and Walmart groceries, while Trump staffers hit up Trump Grill and McDonald's, says Eater. The site searched spending records from the Federal Elections Commission to find out how each presidential hopeful was feeding their staff.

Florida, the largest citrus-growing state in the nation, will harvest less than three-fourths as many oranges as last year because of damage from Hurricane Irma, said the USDA. In its monthly crop report, the agency estimated orange production at 50 million boxes, 9-percent less than it estimated a month ago and 27-percent less than the 2016/17 crop of 68.75 million boxes.

Florida was on track for its first increase in orange production in five years until Hurricane Irma pounded the state last month with the crop nearly ready for harvest. USDA's Agricultural Statistics Board, in a rare statement, said the crop could have been 75.5 million boxes based on its survey work before the hurricane, instead of the 54 million boxes forecast afterward, the smallest crop since 1947.

Brazil is the Goliath of orange juice, producing half of the juice in the world, says Quartz, so a worldwide slowdown in consumption is a big problem. Orange production is down sharply to 242 million boxes last year, compared to 400 million in 2014.

Global consumption of orange juice will drop by 2 percent this year, part of an overall 15 percent decline in four years, says USDA. The semiannual "Citrus: World Markets and Trade" report says U.S. consumption will drop by 7 percent, reflecting the impact of citrus greening disease on orange groves in Florida, the largest citrus state.

Federal prosecutors “willfully” failed to share evidence with lawyers defending Cliven Bundy and two sons, who are on trial for an April 2014 armed standoff, ruled U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Days after President Trump cut 2 million acres from a pair of national monuments in Utah, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended reductions of two additional monuments, Gold Butte and Cascade-Siskiyou, to allow “traditional use” of federal land.

A federal judge in Las Vegas said Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff with the government over cattle grazing, can be released on bond from jail during his trial on weapons and conspiracy charges.

School districts serving Philadelphia, Baltimore and Las Vegas joined the Urban School Food Alliance, which now serves 3.6 million students in 10 of the largest U.S. districts with a combined $735 million a year in purchases of food and supplies. The alliance launched a procurement initiative in 2014 for antibiotic-free chicken, and said this year that its members would not relax school lunch standards despite a USDA offer of flexibility on salt and whole grains.

Illinois will encourage the adoption of no-till farming while Minnesota aims to restore 10,000 acres of degraded peatlands with their share of $931 million awarded to agricultural and natural lands projects by the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday. The money is part of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction grants for 25 projects in 30 states.

"Congress needs to take the plunge" in the new farm bill and "insist on conservation practices where it has, up until now, asked for cooperation while dangling a bit of cash," said the Des Moines Register, published in the No. 1 corn and hog state. USDA's soil and water conservation programs traditionally have relied on voluntary cooperation from farmers, aided by cost-sharing funds, but progress is unacceptably slow, said the newspaper in an editorial.

The EPA, to settle a lawsuit over biofuel regulation, said on Monday it would consult with federal wildlife agencies on whether the Renewable Fuel Standard adversely affects endangered species. The consultation would be performed before the EPA finalizes the RFS for 2023-23, now expected in June.

North Carolina has been grappling for years with the enormous quantity of waste produced by its hog farms. But the state has more than twice as many poultry farms, and the state must consider the impact of poultry waste when thinking about how to regulate the agriculture industry, says a new report from the Environmental Working Group.

The District of Columbia is following cities like New York and San Francisco in moving toward curb-side pickup of waste for composting, saying about "148,000 tons of organic waste could be composted annually — about 60 percent of the food and yard waste generated in the city each year," the Washington Post reported.

Farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota produce around 60-80 million pounds of plastic every year, from bags to hold silage to tunnels that protect crops. But in the past two years, thousands of farmers in the two states have joined a program run by Arkansas-based Revolution Plastics to recycle their plastic waste.

In Europe, a designer from Austria, Katharina Unger, is working with Utrecht University on "a system that cultivates edible plastic-digesting fungi," says Wired.

President Xi Jinping has made food security a national priority since becoming China's leader a decade ago, with a multi-prong drive for self-sufficiency in food. It is "an improbable, if not impossible, goal," say analysts from the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a brief.

An ongoing pilot program in Minneapolis that gives $500 a month to 200 low-income households has improved food security, financial security, well-being, and psychological wellness among participants, said three researchers at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. "We do not find evidence that payments cause recipients to work less, a common concern about GBI (guaranteed basic income) programs," they wrote.

The new farm bill should allow the purchase of hot foods with food stamps, said a letter signed by one-fifth of U.S. senators and representatives. The prohibition on hot food, in place since SNAP was created, "is no longer an accurate reflection of American families' dietary or lifestyle needs," said the lawmakers in a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees.

The fifth year of drought in California will cost the agricultural sector $603 million in lower crop revenue, higher costs of pumping water, and lost jobs, says a report by UC-Davis. "Agriculture in California remains strong, with moderate growth in value, and in some cases employment, despite four years of dry conditions," says a summary by the team of five researchers.

Corn and soybean growers in the Midwest face nearly $480 an acre in fixed costs and land rent going into the planting season, and hundreds of dollars more in per-acre expenses for the so-called variable costs of producing a crop, says economist Brent Gloy.

When Congress first experimented with a revenue-support program for farmers, there were few takers. Only 8 percent of "base" acres were enrolled in the so-called ACRE program in 2013.

USDA "may want to consider" changing the March 31 deadline for growers to decide which crop subsidy option to take - a traditional plan based on target prices or a new approach based on crop revenue, says economist Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University.