EPA

President Trump announced a plan to roll back Obama-era clean water regulations that aimed to protect rivers and streams from agricultural runoff and other pollutants. It will remove vast wetlands and thousands of miles of waterways from federal protection.

The EPA has proposed a rule that would exempt industrial livestock farms from a requirement under a “community right-to-know law” that they notify state and local officials of gases produced by the manure on their farms. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

After nearly 1,000 complaints from neighbors about damage from the weedkiller dicamba, the Arkansas State Plant Board banned use of the herbicide on soybeans and cotton during the growing season this year. Yet state officials still are receiving complaints about dicamba, especially in the northeastern corner of the state, near the Missouri border, says NPR's The Salt, and the state is looking for the culprits.

Facing an October deadline to ban the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, the EPA asked a federal appeals court on Monday for a rehearing of the case that resulted in the ban. The environmental law firm Earthjustice said the EPA request will postpone the court order of early August to ban the pesticide in 60 days.

On Thursday, after months of complaints about undue secrecy, the EPA unveiled a modified website on the Renewable Fuel Standard that shows its decisions to exempt small-volume refineries from the mandate to mix biofuels into gasoline and diesel fuel.

In a letter to House and Senate ag leaders, officials from 60 U.S. cities have protested a House farm bill provision that would prohibit them from setting local pesticide restrictions that are tougher than the federal government’s.

Many states have reported significant complaints from farmers about dicamba damage to their crops and plants, said an association of state pesticide regulators in calling for the EPA to tighten its rules on use of the weedkiller.

In the No. 1 corn and ethanol state, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told a friendly farm audience on Wednesday that the Trump administration is looking to balance the needs of ethanol makers and oil refiners so that it can allow year-round sales of E15.

Environmental groups told a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday that the EPA had failed to properly assess the risks posed by the weedkiller dicamba to nearby crops and should be ordered to revoke its approval of Monsanto’s version of the herbicide, reported Reuters.

Officials within EPA worked to slow a safety review of glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, in an apparent response to emails from Monsanto, which makes the chemical, said HuffPost. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of HHS, said in early 2015 that it planned to publish a toxicological review of glyphosate before winter of that year, but the review has yet to appear.

Doug Goehring, the state agriculture commissioner in North Dakota, says "90 percent of the problems with off-target movement" of dicamba "may go away" if regulators set a lower application rate for the herbicide. In an interview, Goehring told the Capital Journal that he might allow a lower application rate for crops in his state even if EPA does not revise its rules for the controversial chemical.

On Thursday, the U.S Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals gave the federal government 60 days to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is widely used in agriculture but criticized as a risk to children and farmworkers.

In late June, days before it proposed a target of 15 billion gallons for U.S. consumption of corn ethanol, the EPA was ready to force refiners to blend a larger volume of biofuels into the gasoline and diesel fuel supply, reported Reuters on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the EPA refused to disclose to senators the names of oil companies that received “hardship” waivers that exempt small-volume refineries from having to comply with the Renewable Fuel Standard.