The agriculture industry is betting that new technology for editing the genes of plants will yield enhanced crops—and potentially reset a long-running debate over genetically engineered seeds. Seed developers including Monsanto Co. and DowDuPont Inc. have invested in gene-editing technology, which enables scientists to make precise changes to plants’ existing DNA. Executives say they’re also strategizing on how to introduce it to consumers without arousing the same fears and suspicion that followed the development of GMOs.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a filing on Tuesday said it will dismantle Obama-era rules for buying and selling livestock, a move that has divided the U.S. meat industry. While some of the biggest meat companies opposed the rule, smaller producers fought to keep the regulation in place. Some felt intimidated by the larger processors, who control large segments of the country’s meat industry. [node:read-more:link]

The absurd way in which Washington pays to put out wildfires throughout the West is making a dangerous situation even more so. It’s a rare point of bipartisan agreement in Congress that a fix is urgently needed, particularly as fires grow in duration and intensity. The root problem: the U.S. Forest Service is strapped for cash. Its firefighting budget amounts to a fraction of what it actually costs to fight fires. Not sending firefighters is hardly an option. [node:read-more:link]

Hurricane Maria has exposed and intensified the island’s ecological crisis and its human consequences. Can it build a sustainable future? We’d followed the path that Hurricane Maria’s eye had taken along the highway to the west of San Juan. Three weeks after the storm, the tropical green was just starting to come back, sprouting over the brown wounds of mud and giant trees pulled up from their roots. Here in Arecibo, a small municipality about 40 minutes from San Juan on a good day, high-water marks from the flood stood out on building walls, seven or eight feet high. [node:read-more:link]

President Donald Trump intervened personally with the Environmental Protection Agency amid pressure from Republicans in the politically important state of Iowa who worried the agency was poised to weaken biofuel quotas, three people familiar with the discussions said. [node:read-more:link]

Shortly after being confirmed in March, Perdue announced he’d be leading the USDA’s first major reorganization since the mid-1990s. The first stage of the reorganization created a new Farm Production and Conservation mission area, and an under secretary role to support it. The mission area encompasses a wide scope of the agency’s work, including risk management, crop insurance, commodity programs, and conservation. [node:read-more:link]

President Donald Trump's decision to end a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was benefiting roughly 6 million Americans helps fulfill a campaign promise, but it also risks harming some of the very people who helped him win the presidency.Nearly 70 percent of those benefiting from the so-called cost-sharing subsidies live in states Trump won last November, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. [node:read-more:link]

Tony DiMare, a third-generation Florida tomato grower, has spent two decades contending with cheap Mexican imports, watching his neighbors abandon crops in their fields and sell off their farms when they couldn't match the price of incoming produce. [node:read-more:link]

President Donald Trump's proposed cuts in biofuels will hurt American farmers and create a "cannibalistic" battle between middle American farmers and Big Oil, say four Republican governors in states that backed Trump in the 2016 election. The proposal by Trump's Environmental Protection Agency would allow fuel producers to use less corn, soybean and other agricultural biomass in gasoline and other fuels. [node:read-more:link]

Improving water quality and soil health continues to be a priority for farmers statewide, and while data has always been available to support this claim, it hasn’t been accessible in one, easily navigable location. To address this issue, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, using information compiled by the Indiana Conservation Partnership (ICP), launched today an online story map, a one-stop shop for Indiana’s conservation efforts. [node:read-more:link]