A recent bout of listeria infection potentially caused by cheese has reignited the fierce debate around raw milk.  On March 9, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that two people had died in Vermont and Connecticut and four others had fallen ill after eating soft, raw-milk cheese from Vulto Creamery, an artisanal cheesemaker based in upstate New York. All six people had been infected with listeria. [node:read-more:link]

U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) have introduced new bipartisan legislation to give top U.S. agriculture and food officials permanent representation on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.  The “Food Security is National Security Act of 2017” also would include new agriculture and food-related criteria for CFIUS to consider when reviewing transactions that could result in control of a U.S. business by a foreign company. [node:read-more:link]

San Francisco-based food technology company Memphis Meats announced today what it is calling “the world’s first clean poultry” — food products created by replicating chicken and duck cells. The announcement comes a year after the company created its first product made from beef cells in the form of a meatball.“We aim to produce meat in a better way, so that it is delicious, affordable and sustainable,” said Uma Valeti, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Memphis Meats. “It is thrilling to introduce the first chicken and duck that didn’t require raising animals.” [node:read-more:link]

Environmental groups are asking the Scott Pruitt-led U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The election of Donald Trump signals an end to the recent optimism about reducing the mass imprisonment of two million U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Wildfires devastated a Smithfield Foods Inc hog farm in Laverne, Oklahoma, killing at least several thousand pigs, company and local officials said on Friday.  The exact number of swine killed in the Oklahoma fire, which began on Monday, was not immediately known. Smithfield did not say how many died in the blaze, but said no workers were harmed. [node:read-more:link]

Many of these programs have yielded promising results, such as improved science test scores (Klemmer, Waliczek, and Zajicek, 2005; Rahm, 2002). Evaluations of farm-to-school programs have shown improvements in child and teacher eating behaviors, food service at the school level, farmer involvement, and parent attitudes and/or behaviors toward healthy foods (Joshi, Azuma, and Feenstra, 2008). [node:read-more:link]

While there are arguments for and against vertical farming, whether consumers are even willing to buy vertically farmed produce—an important consideration in the cost-benefit discussion—is rarely discussed. Recent agricultural technologies—such as genetically modified (GM) crops, food irradiation, and nanotechnology—have often been met with consumer skepticism (Frewer et al., 2011; Dannenberg, 2009; Siegrist et al., 2007; Ragaert et al., 2004), so it is unclear how vertical farming will fare with consumers. [node:read-more:link]

A third case of avian influenza has struck southern Tennessee, confirmed the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) on March 16. The highly pathogenic H7N9 infection occurred in a commercial breeder flock in Lincoln County, Tennessee, where the state’s first 2017 case occurred.  [node:read-more:link]

Hungry honey bees appear to favor flowers in agricultural areas over those in neighboring urban areas. The discovery has implications for urban beekeepers and challenges assumptions that farmland and honey bees are incompatible, said authors of a new study from The Ohio State University.The team positioned honey bee colonies in an apiary in a central Ohio cemetery smack in the middle of where urban residential development transitions into farmland. [node:read-more:link]