Items Tagged with 'missouri'

Recent rains have brought some relief to producers reeling from drought in the Midwest, though many are hoping more will arrive to help usher their crops through the rest of the growing season.

Producers are working to recover from dozens of tornadoes that tore through six different states over the weekend, including one giant storm with up to 206-mile-per-hour winds that ripped apart grain bins, destroyed poultry barns and killed at least 64 people across nine Kentucky counties.

From farm to space. That’s the journey astronaut Michael Hopkins has taken.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a community advocacy group and a worker at Smithfield’s Milan, Mo., pork plant, finding the company has taken “significant steps … to reduce the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak at the plant.”

Following a $15 million award for compensatory damages, a federal jury has awarded a Missouri peach farm $250 million in punitive damages in its dicamba drift case against Bayer and BASF.

Twitter-transmitted pictures of spring 2019 in the Midwest have made my feed a stream of continuous heartbreak. Video after video of flooded fields and homes, stuck tractors, ruined crops, with pictures of tornado damage serving as the visual exclamation point to the slow-moving disaster that we’re living in the central part of the nation. We’ve have several hundred acres under water on our farm, our fields are dotted with wet spots and ruts, and we’re the fortunate ones, given what I see on my social media feed. It is a helpless feeling to watch as farmers and homeowners throughout the Midwest suffer from this disaster of historic proportions.

I think there is a fairly large contingent of journalists covering climate or agriculture or both who think we could stop climate change with a single admission by a major farm organization that the only logical reaction to increasing atmospheric carbon is abject terror.

Richard Fordyce, a former director of the Missouri Department of Agriculture, has been selected as administrator of USDA’s Farm Service Agency.