Steve King

Incendiary Rep. Steve King survived the closest election of his career in 2016 by defeating Democrat J.D. Scholten by 3 percentage points. He faces a potentially tougher race in the Republican primary election on Tuesday, against four challengers who say they are just as conservative as King without his tinge of white extremism.

On the birthday of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, the House passed a resolution rejecting white nationalism and white supremacy. Majority-party Democrats called the vote a day after House Republicans barred Rep. Steve King of Iowa from serving on any committee after the representative was quoted questioning why the language of white supremacy has "become offensive."

Five weeks after Californians voted for still-stronger animal welfare standards, House and Senate negotiators discarded farm bill language sponsored by Iowa Rep. Steve King to roll such state measures back. King, a Republican who recently won a tight race for re-election, had hoped to overturn …

Anti-immigrant Rep. Steve King has suddenly found himself fighting his toughest re-election contest in years in the reliably conservative northwestern quadrant of Iowa, with an online poll showing his Democratic challenger trailing him by just a single point. (No paywall)

A vast body of state laws regulates farming, from monitoring agricultural pollution and farm runoff, to pesticide applications, labor rules, and animal welfare. But many of those regulations could be subject to challenge if recently proposed legislation in Congress becomes law. The skirmish over the new legislation is the latest in a long series of fights about who is best suited to regulate food production, processing, and labeling—the federal government, or the states. This time, the fight could make it all the way to the farm bill.

Rick Bertrand hopes to turn conservative firebrand Steve King, who backed ethanol skeptic Ted Cruz in the Iowa presidential caucuses, into the first Republican incumbent to lose a House primary race this year. If Bertrand scores in the Iowa primary today, it will be an upset if only because incumbents have won renomination 98 percent of the time since 1946.

Kansas Sen Pat Roberts easily won his fourth term in the Senate, beating independent Greg Orman by 9 points. Roberts says he expects to be Agriculture Committee chairman when Republicans take control of the Senate in January. He would be the first person to chair the both the House and Senate Agriculture committees.

From soda taxes in California to neck-and-neck Senate races in the heartland, an abundance of races of import for U.S. food and agriculture policy will be decided in the Nov 4 elections.

U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller dismissed a lawsuit by six egg-producing states to overturn a California law that says eggs sold to its citizens can come only from hens given enough room to stand up, lay down, turn around and fully extend their wings. The 2010 law imposes the same standard on eggs imported for sale in California as a 2008 referendum put on the state's egg farmers.