U.S. federal executive department overseeing agriculture, farming, food safety, rural development, trade policy, and agricultural research.
A U.S. district judge has blocked USDA's plan to move the Forest Service headquarters and close 23 research facilities until at least 11 December. Judge Vince Chhabria's preliminary injunction preserves the status quo until a ruling, though he noted the relief could be relatively short.
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University of Florida researchers found more than 17 species of pathogenic bacteria associated with bacterial blotch of white button mushrooms. The university says that means single-pathogen methods may not be sufficient, a claim the identification work cannot test by itself.
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McDonald's US comparable sales rose 0.8% last quarter despite $5 and $6 meal deals, against 8.5% at Burger King. Its turnaround now depends on franchisees spending $1 million a store on remodels after the deal blitz irked them.
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Rutgers lab tests found a yeast left by common fruit flies repels the spotted-wing drosophila and cuts its egg-laying. It gives blueberry growers a lead on a control that is not an insecticide, though field trials have not yet been run.
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Ben Mansfeld's team built a Southern crabapple reference genome and sequenced over 150 wild samples, finding 242 DNA regions linked to local climate. The links are to where each tree grew, so the regions are hardiness candidates that still have to be tested in living trees.
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Trump's tariff cut on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings will shave a couple of cents off ground beef at best, by Vox's reckoning. The political cost runs the other way, as farm-state Republicans attack a plan that helps their cattle ranchers' foreign competitors.
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UConn researchers surveyed 233 plant enthusiasts and found they want expert training to identify emerging plant diseases and invasive species. Because respondents came through garden clubs and extension newsletters, the survey shows willing helpers exist but cannot size demand across the country.
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University of Kentucky and USDA researchers tracked 21 major hydrocarbon peaks and found mating reshapes screwworm flies' chemical coat, most in females. Fly behavior was not tested, so its value for monitoring and control is still a hypothesis.
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China's tariff relief list for 1,619 US products leaves out commodity soybeans, a crop the US exported $16.5 billion of last year. Holding back the crop at the center of US-China farm tensions gives Beijing a lever over Midwest farm prices to trade in a later round.
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The proposal would open more than 44 million acres of national forest to roads and logging on a wildfire-risk argument that published ignition studies do not support.
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Corn and oat futures are up more than 12% since the start of August on war, drought and two USDA yield cuts. Seeking Alpha reports the growers selling into that rally are in their most acute operational crisis in decades.
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Districts increasingly justify universal school meals on test scores. The three kinds of evidence available point in different directions once you separate which schools adopt the program from what the program does.
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USDA's screwworm response now takes its placement orders from habitat and weather models built by its own livestock insects lab in Kerrville, Texas. The agency did not report how accurately those models forecast.
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Fortune attributes the US goods deficit with Canada to oil bought cheap for Midwest refineries. Washington's answer so far is a 50% tariff on $20 billion of Canadian products and an import ban on whey, alcohol and mopeds.
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The USDA projects 4.52 billion bushels for 2026, about 800 pounds a head. An environmental historian traces how industrial crushing after 1910 turned the bean into the oil and lecithin most eaters never see.
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Researchers screened dozens of candidate morphogenic genes crop by crop, then switched the winners on alongside the edit itself, and wild strawberry reached a fully regenerated edited plant more than a month faster.
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Tuesday's proclamations put a three-week clock on Canadian dairy and alcohol worth about $433 million a year, while the larger and undated exposure is the federal buying from Canada that has averaged near $2.2 billion annually since fiscal 2021.
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An analysis by the Accountability Board, a nonprofit that backs higher-welfare farming, tallies trademark and real estate payments since 2004 between two bodies the law requires to keep separate, nearly half of them never reported.
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Federal advice tells Americans to eat fatty fish and to pick salmon, an instruction that holds only while the species keeps standing in for the nutrient. The USDA-led study says the feed underneath it changed.
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An 18,445-case cyclospora outbreak was the summer's loudest number, but the one that matters to anyone buying imported produce is 214: FDA foreign food inspections in two quarters, against 805 in all of fiscal 2024.
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Product · August 21, 2026 · One report1 publisher