Agriculture

"More than half the members of a panel considering changes to the nation’s blueprint for healthy eating have ties to the food industry"

"In 2013, an 18-month old boy got sick after playing near a hollow tree in his backyard, in a remote West African village. He developed a fever and started vomiting. His stool turned black. Two days later, he died."

"A U.S. federal appeals court on Monday blocked California from requiring that Bayer AG label its glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup with a cancer warning, handing the company a victory in its ongoing litigation over the product."

"The Trump administration’s adoption of narrower protections for wetlands and waterways can take effect almost everywhere in the nation, except Colorado, while courts review whether the move was legal."

"If, like me, you live in Los Angeles — or Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix or Salt Lake City — you drink water from the Colorado River. You probably eat vegetables grown with Colorado River water, and maybe you eat beef fed on alfalfa grown with Colorado River water. When you switch on a light or charge your phone, some of the electricity may be generated by Colorado River water."

"Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's directive last week promoting grazing on Forest Service land could rekindle a long-running debate about why the federal government is in the livestock-grazing business."

"When Randy Jordan, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in central Massachusetts, looked into turning manure from his 300 cows into natural gas more than a decade ago, he just wanted to find a way to lower his increasingly painful electric bill."

"From Florida to New Jersey, workers and doctors are worried about more outbreaks during the summer harvest."

"A controversial flood control and drainage project in Mississippi that EPA vetoed more than a decade ago is aggravating old tensions among environmental groups, lawmakers and agricultural groups in the Magnolia State as the Trump administration plans its next move."

"Titanic swarms of desert locusts resembling dark storm clouds are descending ravenously on the Horn of Africa. They're roving through croplands and flattening farms in a devastating salvo experts are calling an unprecedented threat to food security. On the ground, subsistence planters can do nothing but watch — staring up with horror and at their fields in dismay."