Two industry-backed bills in the Texas Legislature would charge environmental activists who allegedly engage in civil disobedience at oil and gas sites with a felony. [node:read-more:link]

Pure tallow made by JBS Souderton for use in pet food contained the euthanasia drug pentobarbital, according to an FDA warning letter. The company, which does business under the name MOPAC, said it had cleaned equipment after the FDA and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture found lax testing protocols, but traces of pentobarbital were subsequently found, indicating that measures the company put in place were insufficient to prevent pentobarbital-contaminated ingredients from being used in finished tallow, according to the warning. [node:read-more:link]

Biggest U.S. dairy maker is losing sales and exploring sale or breakup as milk consumption wanes [node:read-more:link]

In areas where floodwaters have receded, farmers are left to deal with piles of sand, debris on their fields [node:read-more:link]

Animal welfare groups have reached a milestone agreement with ranching interests they say would save wild  mustangs from slaughter but the compromise has opened a nasty split among horse protection advocates.The Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals say their proposal backed by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation would eliminate the threat of slaughter for thousands of free-roaming horses primarily by spending millions of dollars on expanding fertility controls on the range.As part [node:read-more:link]

The University of Minnesota has established a new rural stress task force to address a wide range of socioeconomic issues. University of Minnesota Extension Dean Bev Durgan said the effort comes in response to the stress on farm families and rural communities brought on by several years of low farm income."We're losing farms. Main Street is looking different — and [the] Extension's role is to really help people be able to get the information they need and to help them make decisions of what this means for them," Durgan said."Is it to prevent farm foreclosures? [node:read-more:link]

Food may be the next frontier in research on a wide array of potentially toxic chemicals increasingly showing up in drinking water and groundwater nationally. Art Schaap and Fred Stone milk dairy cows more than 2,000 miles from each other, but right now, neither one of them can sell their milk. [node:read-more:link]

For scientists, it’s a significant accomplishment to get your work published in a peer-reviewed journal. The process of submitting a paper, fielding reviewer comments, and revising the work can take months (or years!), and final publication in a respected journal lends credibility to any researcher’s work. So it was odd when the Washington Post reported last week that USDA was now requiring its researchers to label outside peer-reviewed scientific publications with the word “preliminary”. But this wasn’t actually news to me. [node:read-more:link]