Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agriculture published its new standard for organic livestock production. Industry groups say that this will help producers compete and promote trust in organic products for consumers.

Thousands of competitors come to the American Royal Livestock Show in Kansas City, Missouri, each year to show their best livestock. The competition includes children as young as 7 years old, who take part in a long tradition of raising and showing their animals.

Drought has affected several pumpkin-producing states, including Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. But rain arrived at the right time to produce a bumper crop in parts of the Midwest.

Most of the coverage around PFAS focuses on the toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water. But contamination of food and agricultural products is still not fully understood.

About a quarter of the United States’s irrigated cropland sits on top of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains. But water levels are dropping, and states are taking different approaches to monitoring how much groundwater irrigators are pumping out.

Proposed projects would add more than 3,000 miles of new carbon pipelines through rural parts of the Midwest. Some emergency officials are concerned about safety, especially after a rupture on a similar pipeline three years ago.

Back-to-back years of drought have left the Mississippi River's water levels low. It's part of more frequent extremes on the river, which affects the barge industry and farmers who need to ship their grain.

Farmers say Title One — a farm bill program that sends money when crop prices or harvests get low enough — isn’t working as a buffer against tough years. Yet others argue the nearly 100-year-old safety net is costing billions of dollars with few strings attached.

The leaders of both Congressional agriculture committees say federal lawmakers will move back farm bill negotiations to December. The current law expires Sept. 30, but experts say there should be little peril despite the blown deadline.

A bill to support solar power production on farmland passed the Michigan Senate Tuesday.