Texas

The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to finally hear a lawsuit between Texas and New Mexico over water rights to the Rio Grande, says The Texas Tribune. Three years ago, the Lone Star state alleged that New Mexico farmers were taking more than their fair share of the river’s water. Now a court-appointed special master, Gregory Grismal, has released a 273-page report recommending that the court ignore New Mexico’s request to drop the suit.

Last November, the EPA cancelled the registration of the pesticide sulfoxaflor, a step required by a U.S. appeals court decision. However, the agency has now granted an emergency exemption sought by the Texas Department of Agriculture for use of sulfoxaflor this year against the sugarcane aphid on up to 3 million acres of sorghum, said Agri-Pulse.

An investigation by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper says that, despite a Texas state law intended to assure migrant farmworkers have clean and safe housing, "many housing facilities elude the reach of the state's limited inspection effort."

Much of central and southern Texas is abnormally dry following unusually warm weather and two months of scanty rainfall, reports the Drought Monitor.

Grocery store prices for beef are at record highs and the government says they will rise again in the new year, although not as sharply as this year.

Some 55.3 million acres of U.S. farmland are irrigated, says the Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, drawn from USDA's 2012 Census of Agriculture.

Three states in the Great Plains - Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma - account for nearly half of crop insurance indemnities paid so far this year, say USDA data.

Food prices will climb a modest 3 percent this year, close to the long-term average of 2.8 percent, said USDA in a monthly update.

Satellite images show California turning brown from its three-year drought, says Weather.com, which posted pictures taken by NASA's Aqua satellite in mid-2011 and this summer. "In the animated image, California's Central Valley appears to have lost much of its plant life, as the green portion in the middle of the image has thinned in the last three years.

The Drought Monitor says arid conditions deepened in the central and southern Plains during the past week with Kansas as the leading edge "of the intense drought that seems to be waking up and pushing rapidly north along with warmer temperatures."

The 2014 farm law ended the direct-payment subsidy and made crop insurance the major farm support. For most states, there is little difference in the state's share of the receipts.

The heat-and-eat "spat" could lead to Republican attempts to end the Low Income Energy Assistance Program and so-called categorical eligibility for food stamps, especially if the GOP gains control of the Senate...

Mike Conaway of Texas, chairman of the House Ethics Committee, said he began the footwork last year to succeed Frank Lucas as chairman of the Agriculture Committee in 2015.