Sometimes, farmers adopt conservation practices without assistance from a conservation program. Conservation practices provide benefits to society at large (through improved environmental quality) and to the farmers themselves. Conservation tillage, for example, reduces labor and fuel costs—and may be profitable for some farmers if crop yields can be maintained or improved. Conservation tillage can also help improve water quality by reducing the loss of sediment and nutrients. [node:read-more:link]

This county-level picture of the food retailing landscape also provides a starting point for measuring access to healthy, affordable food—a measure explored in more detail in another ERS mapping tool, the Food Access Research Atlas. The Food Access Research Atlas allows users to investigate multiple measures of access at the census tract level. These measures include a population’s distance from residence to a large grocery store, supermarket, or supercenter; household availability of a vehicle to drive to the stores; and the poverty rate and median family income for census tracts. [node:read-more:link]

In the heart of the Napa Valley, a vineyard produces fine Cabernet Sauvignon with virtually no help from laborers. The 40-acre “touchless vineyard” was established by Kaan Kurtural, a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist who has devoted much of his career to improving production efficiency in vineyards as labor shortages have worsened. “We set this up to be a no-touch vineyard,” he said. [node:read-more:link]

The Maryland Legislature approved the Fiscal Year 2019 State Operating Budget that includes funds to support the Rural Maryland Prosperity Investment Fund (RMPIF), a key step forward in addressing disparities in the State’s rural areas.  The Rural Maryland Prosperity Investment Fund will receive $6,000,000 in funding for targeted investment to promote economic prosperity in Maryland’s traditionally disadvantaged and undeserved rural communities. [node:read-more:link]

Ross County, with its rolling forested green hills and quaint two-century-old county seat, is an image of idyllic rural America. But as night fell here on a warm Tuesday in May, chaos descended on the Ross County Sheriff’s Office. A neighbor called to report a disturbance, likely a violent domestic dispute, and another called to report a man slumped over the steering wheel of his pickup, likely an overdose. Calls of other suspicious vehicles came flooding in. [node:read-more:link]

Entrepreneurship has been the key driving force in developing and designing innovative food strategies at local and regional levels. Food strategies include methods and procedures of production, aggregation, distribution, transportation, marketing, and resource management. The three pillars of creating and establishing a successful venture involve entrepreneurial mindsets/attributes, entrepreneurial knowledge/skills, and entrepreneurial opportunities. [node:read-more:link]

When the man in the teal hoodie mentioned that he had trained as a pharmacy technician, Lachelle Hill’s voice rose in excitement. “Why don’t I see that on here?” the state job counselor asked, pointing at the paperwork on the table between them. Unemployment insurance beneficiaries are required to look for work, but Hill wasn’t just checking Corey’s paperwork for compliance. She was helping him focus his job search, and trying to steer him toward positions he was qualified for.Such conversations are central to a reemployment grant program that the U.S. [node:read-more:link]

While beekeepers have experienced severe annual colony losses for more than a decade, they’ve managed to keep total hive numbers stable, the USDA has found. More than a decade since the appearance of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder,” beekeepers still face abnormally high levels of bee die-offs, according to USDA.Despite the greater annual mortality rate, however, beekeepers have kept the total number of hives stable and generally haven’t sharply hiked up their pollination service fees, the agency found. [node:read-more:link]

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue today announced that the United States submitted a counter notification in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Committee on Agriculture (COA) on India’s market price support (MPS) for wheat and rice. Filed on May 4, 2018, this is the first ever COA notification under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture regarding another country’s measures. Based on U.S. calculations, it appears that India has substantially underreported its market price support for wheat and rice. [node:read-more:link]

The report’s research shows that between 1992 and 2012, almost 31 million acres of agricultural land were irreversibly lost to development. That is nearly double the amount of conversion previously documented and is equivalent to losing most of Iowa or New York. As alarming, this loss included almost 11 million acres of the best land for intensive food and crop production. This is land where the soils, micro-climates, growing seasons, and water availability combine to allow intensive production with the fewest environmental impacts. [node:read-more:link]