A battle royal is brewing over what to call animal cells grown in cell culture for food. Should it be in-vitro meat, cellular meat, cultured meat or fermented meat? What about animal-free meat, slaughter-free meat, artificial meat, synthetic meat, zombie meat, lab-grown meat, non-meat or artificial muscle proteins? Then there is the polarizing “fake” versus “clean” meat framing that boils this complex topic down to a simple good versus bad dichotomy. [node:read-more:link]

In good years, cargo trains moving west along the flat, sweeping grasslands of North Dakota’s plains are a sign of money rolling in. Today, as tariffs from America’s largest foreign soybean market -- China -- threaten to upend the industry, many trains sit idle.“There are no shuttle trains leaving. There is no nothing,” said Joe Ericson, the 38-year-old president of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association. [node:read-more:link]

Milk prices have remained in a fairly narrow range thus far in 2018, with the monthly low of $15.30 per hundredweight (cwt.) registered in February and the high of $16.30 per cwt. posted in June. Early in 2018 there was optimism that U.S. milk prices would move higher in the second half of the year, as it was expected that stronger demand, especially export demand, and lower milk supplies would give a boost to prices. The time has come to recognize that it is going to take a notable shift in one of three areas to move US milk prices higher: 1. A slowdown in U.S. milk production 2. [node:read-more:link]

Grandparents taking responsibility for raising their grandchildren in Pennsylvania have new help available to them under two pieces of legislation signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Tom Wolf. The measures sprung from increasing pressure placed on grandparents as a result of the opioid epidemic, which has impacted many individuals in their 20s and 30s and resulted in older generations becoming caregivers for more youngsters. According to a press release from the governor’s office, an estimated 76,000 grandparents are caring for more than 83,800 grandchildren in the state. [node:read-more:link]

The number of unaccompanied minor children held in Texas shelters reached a new high in October, months after the administration of President Donald Trump ended its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border.There were 5,385 children living at privately run shelters for unaccompanied youth as of Oct. 18, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which regulates the federally funded shelters. [node:read-more:link]

A survey of Big Island farmers has found that they suffered nearly $28 million in damages because of the months-long eruption earlier this year of the Kilauea volcano, the Hawaii Tribune Herald reported. [node:read-more:link]

The Conservation Stewardship Program began as the Conservation Security Program in the 2002 Farm Bill, and its current iteration was first authorized in the 2008 bill. The nation’s leading conservation program by acreage, CSP pays farmers to improve their practices in ways that benefit the air, water, and soil without taking land out of rotation like the Conservation Reserve Program requires them to do. [node:read-more:link]

First, Beijing slapped tariffs on American soybeans. Now, it wants to wean its farmers off them altogether. China has been facing a potential soybean shortage after it put a new 25% tariff on importing them from the United States in July, part of the escalating trade war between the two countries.China is the world's biggest buyer of soybeans, using them as a protein-rich feed for livestock such as pigs and chickens. More than a third of its supply comes from the United States.Beijing's solution to get by without US beans? [node:read-more:link]

A Chinese-owned pork producer is eligible for federal payments under President Donald Trump's $12 billion farm bailout, a program that was established to help U.S. farmers hurt by Trump's trade war with China. Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based pork producer acquired in 2013 by a Chinese conglomerate now named WH Group, can apply for federal money under the bailout program created this summer, said Agriculture Department spokesman Carl E. Purvis.JBS, a subsidiary of a Brazilian company by the same name, is also eligible to apply for the federal money. [node:read-more:link]

Chance, was in her Toyota Tundra following the arrows when she thought, “Thank God for the community.” “You think the government would have come out to help us country folk,” she said. “But we are still struggling.”In the week after the catastrophic Hurricane Michael, residents have watched supply trucks and federal emergency officials come through the rural town of Alford, population 400. But most of them did not stop here, where the power is still out, few have clean water and people have been sleeping outside.There are small towns facing similar fates along Michael’s destructive trail. [node:read-more:link]