"Tops and tails are becoming much more than garbage at Gills Onions, an onion processor in Oxnard, Calif. Today marks the unveiling of the company's onion-powered electrical system, a first-of-its-kind initiative to turn onion waste into energy."

"Imported insects have been deployed as foot soldiers in the fight against invasive bugs and plants that cause billions of dollars in damage each year. But some of those imports are proving to be pests themselves that upset the balance of nature and threaten native species."

"A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined."

The agricultural giant, Syngenta, has petitioned the USDA to grant its new genetically modified corn a non-regulated status. Some experts fear that the strain, meant solely for producing ethanol, could end up in the food supply.

Florida has become the first state in the country to set regulations for the purity of honey -- prohibiting chemicals or additives, including corn syrup sweeteners, in products marked as honey.

"Honeybees may not be the first thing that come to mind when you think of Brooklyn. Yet ... a growing number of urbanites who keep bees in cities across the country. Their motivations vary."

"In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national."

"California's San Joaquin Valley has lost 60 million acre-feet of groundwater since 1961, according to a new federal study. ... The Central Valley is America's largest farming region; it's also the single-largest zone of groundwater pumping."

"The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans."

"Wine makers are shaking things up in their vineyards. Some of them use natural and organic methods to control pests and weeds instead of using pesticides. Now, one winery has discovered a unique, natural way to prune their grape vines."

"San Joaquin Valley farms are laying off workers and letting fields lie fallow as their water ration falls."

Urban farmer Will Allen, half a mile from Milwaukee's biggest housing project, is different from others in the good-food movement.

The Oregon legislature Monday sent to the governor a bill that would phase out the longstanding practice of burning off agricultural fields growing grass seed.

Ranchers and farmers are rebelling against a federal plan to tag livestock with microchips and track them birth to slaughterhouse for disease control and food safety.

The 1988 highway death of a family in Oregon, blinded by smoke from fields being burned for weed control, was a story so moving that it spawned a novel. Field burning is so common in Oregon that it threatens people's lungs and health. A legislative struggle to ban it remains unresolved.