Articles by Agri-Pulse staff

Findings from a USDA Economic Research Service ERS report suggest that access to federal or state-inspected slaughter and processing facilities is limited in some parts of the country, hindering local producers’ ability to meet the growing demands for locally sourced meat.

“Irreplaceable crop diversity is threatened by extinction in nature, in traditional farmers’ fields, and even in developed nations,” says Peter Bretting, USDA’s Agricultural Research Service National Program Leader in Plant Germplasm and Genomes.

Off-farm grain storage capacity grew twice as fast as on-farm storage since 2005, according to a CoBank report indicating that the grain handling industry’s business model is shifting.

Now that U.S. and European Union leaders have given a conditional nod to the pursuit of a free trade agreement between the two markets, U.S. agriculture interests are waiting to see if there is a serious effort to resolve a number of farm- and food-related issues that have stymied a transatlantic t

Conservation and environmental groups, including the Environmental Working Group, hailed Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., when his amendment linking participation in the federal crop insurance program to conservation compliance, passed on the Senate floor last week by 52-47.

The G8 Science Ministers met in London on Wednesday as part of the UK’s G8 Presidency, where they focused on antibiotic resistance as a global danger.

The United States, together with the other eight countries that make up the TPP the Trans-Pacific Partnership invited Mexico to join the negotiations of this initiative on Monday. Canada joined the “club” a day later. Japan is still a possibility.

U.S. and European Union officials are reportedly near a decision on whether to pursue a free trade agreement. An assessment of a possible FTA from trade officials on both sides of the Atlantic is expected later this month.

The European Commission’s agriculture and rural development directorate, the EU equivalent of a country’s agriculture ministry, has fired off an unusual rebuttal to a new U.S. industry-led group that hopes to put a brake on EU claims to exclusive use of many popular food names.

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) suggests the emissions estimating methodologies (EEM) proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the development of lagoons and basins for swine and dairy feeding operations is not worth the paper it’s printed on.