USDA

Farmers and ranchers have two additional weeks to enroll in the Conservation Stewardship Program, which pays producers for practicing conservation on working lands. The deadline for applications initially was set for Friday but now will be March 13, says the Natural Resources Conservation Service. An official announcement will be made this morning.

Former deputy agriculture secretary Kathleen Merrigan will become a co-chair of the AGree farm-policy initiative, succeeding Gary Hirshberg, founder of the organic food company Stonyfield Farm. Hirshberg is a leader in the campaign to label GMO foods. As a Senate staff worker, Merrigan had a key role in legislation creating the national organic program in 1990 and in implementing it nearly a decade later at the USDA. She was deputy secretary from 2009-13.

The second mammoth soybean crop in two years will swell U.S. supply to its largest size in nine years, says the Agriculture Department in updated projections for this year's crops. The soybean stockpile, forecast for 385 million bushels when this year's crop is mature, is expected to grow by 12 percent, to 430 million bushels, by Sept. 1, 2016, despite record soybean exports, says the USDA. On the final day of its annual Outlook Forum, it projected...

U.S. farmers will grow their second-largest soybean crop ever this year, and the third-largest corn crop, according to the USDA's revised projections of spring planting. In the opening day of its Outlook Forum, the department projected corn plantings of 89 million acres and soybeans at 83.5 million acres. That's 1 million more acres of corn than was projected in December and 500,000 fewer acres of soybeans. It would put soybean plantings just below the record 83.7 million acres of 2014.

The Internet age, in which information wants to be free, soon will affect grocery shopping, says industry consultant John Hauptman of Willard Bishop. He puts price transparency at the top of three future trends for food retailers. It is inevitable, he said during a panel discussion at USDA's Outlook Forum, that grocers will post more and more of their prices on the Internet, allowing customers to browse electronically for the best deals and for store managers to monitor a competitor's prices.

The USDA's annual Outlook Forum traditionally generates headlines with its projections of U.S. crop production seven months before harvest, a challenging exercise considering the many factors that could intervene. A late-winter surge in commodity prices could sway planting decisions, a cold and rainy spring can force last-minute changes among crops, and a summer drought can destroy crop prospects.

For weeks, the ag world has buzzed with rumors that the new edition of the Dietary Guidelines would downplay the role of meat in healthy diets or even delete red meat from its recommendations. The 2010 Guidelines say at one point, "Choose a variety of protein foods, which include seafood, lean meat and poultry, eggs, beans and peas, soy products, and unsalted nuts and seeds." House Agriculture Committee chairman Mike Conaway raised the issue with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, saying...

Hog farmers, long overshadowed by cattle producers, will expand production faster than the cattle industry, resulting in Americans eating more pork than beef in 2017, says the USDA in its long-term agricultural baseline. The department released the complete 97-page baseline on Tuesday; a trimmed-down version that covered crop projections was released in December. The USDA pegs pork consumption at 48.8 pounds per person in 2017 compared to 48.5 pounds of beef.

At the first House Agriculture Committee hearing of the year, chairman Mike Conaway told Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, "With commodity markets plummeting and crop producers struggling to find financing, now is precisely the wrong time to weaken crop insurance." It was the latest rebuff from the farm sector of White House proposals to reduce crop insurance spending by 17 percent through a lower premium subsidy on revenue policies that insure the price at harvest time, and by adjusting payment rates for prevented-planting claims.

Five weeks into the year, the Agriculture Department declared natural disaster areas in nine states, from Idaho to California to Texas. In all, 256 counties - 8 percent of all counties in the nation - are eligible for low-interest agricultural loans and disaster relief programs, said the USDA. The weekly Drought Monitor says 28 percent of the contiguous United States is in drought, up nearly 2 points since the start of the year.