Food

RSS

President Joe Biden is nominating to the Supreme Court appellate judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a history-making pick who once upheld mandatory country of origin labeling requirements for meat.

USDA will begin accepting applications for $215 million in grants and technical assistance meant to expand the nation’s meat and poultry processing capacity.

The U.S. poultry industry is better prepared this year to protect flocks from highly pathogenic avian influenza and isn’t likely to be threatened by the virus that’s been detected on a few farms and backyard flocks this month, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Thursday.

Companies and farm groups that are trying to recruit farmers to sign up for climate plans often face skeptical producers who fear that most, if not all, of the financial benefit will go to retailers and manufacturers who get to label their products as good for the environment.

Farmers will be banned from applying chlorpyrifos to food crops starting Monday unless farm groups can persuade an appeals court to intervene, and experts say many growers lack reliable alternatives for controlling insect pests.

It’s been three weeks since Canada submitted its proposal to fix the way it runs its dairy quotas under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, but there’s still no word from the Biden administration on accepting it and preventing yet another trade dispute between Ottawa and Washington that could affect far more than just dairy.

In water-strapped states like Texas, producers are using irrigation to reap the benefits of cover crops. Producers in other states, while not directly irrigating cover crops, see a benefit in the water requirements of their cash crops. 

Recent attention to the country’s meatpacking plants has illustrated that when the four dominant companies face disruptions to processing, smaller, independent operations don’t have adequate capacity to pick up the slack.

The nation’s organic dairies are growing in their ability to produce milk relative to the inputs in the production process, but not nearly at the same rate as other dairies in the country, according to new research from the Department of Agriculture.