Payments from the Market Facilitation Program, administered by U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Service Agency, are also being misused. In 2018, President Trump pledged $12 billion through USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation to provide direct aid to corn, cotton, dairy, hog, sorghum, soybean and wheat producers. [node:read-more:link]

Sen. Carol Blood withdrew her original proposal, Legislative Bill 14, earlier this week and introduced LB 594, which would add a clause to the state’s existing Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The clause would place in violation of the act anyone who "advertises, promotes, labels, represents, illustrates, displays, for sale, offers for sale, attempts to sell, or sells an insect-based, a plant-based, or a lab-grown food product as meat." [node:read-more:link]

USDA inserted a somewhat unusual notice in the Federal Register. This USDA notice was just three pages long and it was written in everyday English. Although it was proposing to take a radical step -- moving the Economic Research Service and the National Institute on Food and Agriculture out of Washington, D.C. -- it made scant effort to justify the move. [node:read-more:link]

House Democrats and Senate Republicans remain bitterly divided over President Donald Trump's call for border-wall funding, but they appear to be on the same page about delaying USDA's controversial proposal to relocate a pair of research agencies outside of the Washington area. [node:read-more:link]

Beth Macy’s book about the opioid crisis in southwest Virginia contains plenty of tragedy — families decimated, lives lost or ruined, proud communities brought to their knees.   The biggest tragedy of all, of course, is that the story could have turned out differently.In the earliest days of the crisis, prophetic voices in rural Virginia sounded the alarm. The pharmaceutical manufacturer whose criminal marketing practices helped launch the epidemic didn’t listen. [node:read-more:link]

The future availability and price for veal in the state of California is cloudy following the passage of a law mandating space requirements for raising food animals, according to the American Veal Association (AVA).The organization is warning that the passage of Proposition 12 in California last year will force farmers in the Golden State to raise about 66 calves in a barn that was designed to hold 200 calves because of the act’s space requirements. Starting Jan. [node:read-more:link]

Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought -- and will likely lead to faster sea level rise -- thanks to the continued, accelerating warming of the Earth's atmosphere, a new study has found. [node:read-more:link]

A new study calling for drastic reductions in meat and dairy products and for policy measures to disincentivize production of these food products is wrong and an attack on animal agriculture, said the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA). “Let’s call the EAT-Lancet Commission’s report what it is — yet another organized attack on animal agriculture that is not reflective of the current and accurate science on the industry’s substantial sustainability advances,” said Joel Newman, president and chief executive officer of the AFIA. [node:read-more:link]

A federal judge voiced doubt this week over the U.S. government’s civil prosecution of a Mason County hemp farm and related parties.U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers lifted a stay in the case caused by the partial federal government shutdown and dissolved an injunction that prevented the farmers from transporting or selling their hemp.But after U.S. [node:read-more:link]

“Rounding out a year characterized by lower farm incomes, uncertainties about agricultural trade and the growth of lending volumes, interest rates on agricultural loans trended higher. The mounting combination of higher leverage and rising rates could put additional pressure on some farm operations.” Today’s update looks at the Kansas City Fed update in more detail with a particular focus on agricultural lending variables and farmland values.“Non-real estate lending continued to increase in the fourth quarter, according to the National Survey of Terms of Lending to Farmers. [node:read-more:link]