The 11,000-year-old Four Corners potato (Salt Lake Tribune): No bigger than a penny, the Four Corners potato has survived in southern Utah for nearly 11,000 years, and was a food source for American Indians in the Escalante and Bears Ears regions and fed white settlers centuries later.
DowDuPont says ag division is worth less (Bloomberg): Weaker markets for seeds and pesticides have reduced the value of DowDuPont’s agriculture arm by $4.6 billion, the company said as it prepares to spin off the unit.
Nearly a quarter-million H-2A positions (AFBF): The Labor Department certified 242,762 positions for H-2A workers in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, one-fifth more than were certified in fiscal 2017 and double the total for 2014.
China culls 200,000 pigs (Reuters): The world’s largest pork producer, China, has killed 200,000 hogs in its ongoing response to outbreaks of highly contagious African swine fever, an often-fatal disease for hogs.
The 100-year war against pink bollworm (USDA): After a century of work that included rigorous control and regulatory actions, the U.S. is free of the pink bollworm, a cotton pest that caused tens of millions of dollars in yield losses.
Dozens of places want ERS and NIFA (Politico): Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says 139 cities in 34 states submitted offers to house the relocated Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Fertilizer, cadmium, Russia and the EU (New York Times): The EU could move forward as early as this week with regulations to limit the amount of cadmium, a toxic metal, in phosphate fertilizer at a moment of intrigue in the industry; the dominant Russian company, PhosAgro, happens to mine low-cadmium phosphate and would prosper at the expense of competitors.