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How much is that doggie in the window? That question may become just an old song title instead of a hopeful customer inquiry, if a trend continues against selling certain animals in pet stores.Maryland recently became the second state to ban retail pet stores from selling puppies and kittens, a move supporters of the legislation say will help discourage “puppy mills” that breed dogs in inhumane conditions and euthanize the animals when they are no longer able to breed. [node:read-more:link]

The Kasich administration and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency are poised to take a stronger regulatory approach to cleaning up the state’s waters, including the open waters of Lake Erie. Three weeks after declaring the western portion of Lake Erie impaired, the Ohio EPA, on April 16, released a study showing “no clear trend” of a nutrient loading decrease in most of the state’s watersheds, citing agriculture and other nonpoint sources as the main contributor. [node:read-more:link]

The House Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill would strip billions in nutrition benefits from American families, rural residents are more likely than metropolitan ones to be participating in the program. Conventional Beltway wisdom is that farm bills pass Congress with relative ease from a rare bipartisan coalition of rural legislators delivering farm programs for their constituencies while urban legislators gain nutrition assistance and food aid in the cities. [node:read-more:link]

The Senate Appropriations Committee has added an emergency rescue package to help struggling dairy farmers get through a very difficult year so far in 2018. Wholesale milk prices remain below the cost of production for many northeast dairy operations. "Help is on the way," said Sen. [node:read-more:link]

Americans say they care more about animal welfare than children’s education and hunger. That’s according to the findings of the “Causes Americans Care About,” a new study that gathered responses from 1,000 adults, 41% of which chose animal welfare number one. Children’s education ranked second with 38% of respondents, followed by hunger, chosen by 33% of respondents.  The top five causes Americans care about in 2018 is rounded out by disease research (No. 4) and disaster relief (No. 5), which bumped the environment out of the top five to the No. 6 position this year. [node:read-more:link]

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has demanded that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stop its “reckless” and “serious disregard for the rule of law” in the agency’s efforts to find illegal immigrants. [node:read-more:link]

A group of Arkansas farmers had little more than a week of access to dicamba before the state Supreme Court intervened on Wednesday, April 25. [node:read-more:link]

The New York state Senate has voted to prohibit any individual convicted of animal cruelty from working in animal shelters.The measure passed the Senate on Wednesday and now moves to the Assembly for consideration.The bill's sponsor, Republican Sen. Patrick Gallivan of Erie County, says the measure aims to protect dogs, cats and other animals from people who have mistreated them in the past. [node:read-more:link]

State authorities will soon be taking an uncharted path in their approaches to regulating CBD oil, growth of industrial hemp, and state-directed cultivation of full-strength marijuana, thanks to a busy legislative session addressing those issues. But the details on how that policy makeover will be implemented are still undefined, which is why the Department of Agriculture & Food met Thursday with business owners, farmers and patient advocates to hear their input before the agency's rule-making process begins in earnest. [node:read-more:link]

The early rounds of the 2018 row crop season have some notable similarities to 2014. Winter temperatures were the lowest since that year in many northern and central areas, punctuated by a harsh cold wave in the first three weeks of April. Much of the Midwest and the Northern Plains had the coldest April 1-18 stretch on record. The cold, along with several occurrences of heavy and record-breaking snow, have led to fieldwork getting off to a very slow start. [node:read-more:link]