The SingleThread restaurant in Northern California's Sonoma County is best known for multi-course meals that have won it widespread acclaim and three Michelin stars. What's less well known is that the farm-to-table restaurant, now facing a pandemic, is already confronting the ravages of climate change, from fires to floods, that threaten its existence, according to FERN's latest story, produced in collaboration with Eater. (No paywall)

Congress allotted the same amount of funding for public nutrition programs that it did for agriculture in the new coronavirus relief bill, even though hunger is on the rise, wrote three economists on Tuesday. "An obvious way to address the problem would be to shift all or most of the $13 billion earmarked for farmers to federal nutrition programs that serve hungry families in real need," the economists said in an essay in The Hill.

USDA names new NIFA director: Carrie Castile, who formerly worked in the USDA rural development and farm program agencies, will begin work on Jan. 4 as the director of the grant-making National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which was moved to Kansas City from Washington in 2019. (USDA) Ag …

The EPA failed to ensure that dicamba can be used safely when it issued a five-year approval of the weedkiller, said a lawsuit that asks a federal appeals court in San Francisco to vacate the EPA registration of the herbicide. Foes say dicamba is overly prone to evaporate from where it is …

Pink bollworm eradicated in Southwest: A combination of biotech cotton and conventional pest control has eradicated the pink bollworm, which had caused tens of millions of dollars of damage annually in the Southwest United States and northern Mexico, scientists report in the Proceedings of the …

The notion of living self-sufficiently off the land has long been an American ideal, particularly in times of crisis. So it’s no surprise that the turmoil of recent decades— from 9/11 and the breakdown of the financial system to continuous war and the existential threat of climate change—has spurred another such movement. In FERN's latest story, published with Virginia Quarterly Review, Michael Meyer takes us inside the National Ladies Homestead Gathering, which Cyndi Ball founded in 2011 at her home in Georgia. The organization has since grown to 34 chapters in 17 states located all across the country, and the goal is someday to have a chapter within 30 minutes of every woman in America.(No paywall)