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]

After historic floods devastated Midwestern agricultural states this spring, some fund managers are evaluating how climate change will affect the long-term value of companies that make or sell products ranging from tractors to fertilizer. The issue is not simply the unpredictability of weather. [node:read-more:link]

Today, China accounts for almost half of Oregon Hay’s sales, with manager Vic Follen traveling to China three to six times a year for the company that exports for 50 or more U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The Department of Energy has given the Environmental Protection Agency its scoring results for the 40 outstanding 2018 applications made by small refineries for waivers from U.S. biofuel laws. The recommendations from the Energy Department are a crucial step in the EPA’s process for weighing the exemption requests, which can save refineries millions of dollars in regulatory costs and have become the center of a bitter dispute between the rival oil and corn industries. The U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Data in the U.S. Energy Information Administration's latest Short Term Energy Outlook forecasts renewable energy resources, including hydroelectricity, will generate more electricity in April and May than coal-fired plants. According to the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis, this would be the first time renewable generation has surpassed coal. [node:read-more:link]

Besides the plan to relocate the Economic Research Service outside Washington, D.C., USDA has also clamped down on the agency’s ability to disseminate its finding through academic journals, a union representative says. [node:read-more:link]