A new lawsuit in California is asking the question if county government can force producers to keep farming in order to keep your own land.
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Artists and museums are often in the thick of free speech debates — think of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s battle with the Brooklyn Museum over a Virgin Mary artwork with elephant dung and more recently a fight over an exhibit that evoked Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse. Typically the art world holds its ground, emerging bruised but resolute. [node:read-more:link]

Hurricane Maria wiped out about 80 percent of the crop value in Puerto Rico — making it one of the costliest storms to hit the island’s agriculture industry. Entire plantations, dairy barns and industrial chicken coops are gone. Hurricane Maria made landfall here Wednesday as a Category 4 storm. Its force and fury stripped every tree of not just the leaves, but also the bark, leaving a rich agricultural region looking like the result of a postapocalyptic drought. Rows and rows of fields were denuded. [node:read-more:link]

Syngenta  announced a settlement with farmers who sued the company following the release of Agrisure Viptera and Agrisure Duracade MIR 162 corn traits. Details of the settlement have not been released at this point, but other media outlets reported on Tuesday the settlement was worth about $1.5 billion.According to a news release from Syngenta, the settlement, which is subject to court approval, would create a settlement fund for the "submission of claims by eligible claimants" who contracted to price corn or corn byproducts after Sept. [node:read-more:link]

Cattle pass a lot of gas, and the methane from their flatulence and especially, their belches, is an expanding burden on the planet. The greenhouse gas has a warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide. [node:read-more:link]

Millions of Florida residents lost power after Hurricane Irma raged through the state. But homeowners with solar energy installations couldn’t use them during the outage – or they’d be breaking the law. State code requires people to connect their homes to the local electric grid – and when parts of it were damaged after the hurricane, even those homeowners with solar power were legally obliged to sit in the dark. [node:read-more:link]

The cost of renewables is plunging faster than forecasters anticipated just a few years ago as as technologies like gigantic wind turbines arrive on the market. [node:read-more:link]

Some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies including Kellogg Co and Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Wednesday they will simplify food expiration labels in an effort to eliminate confusion that contributes to food waste. [node:read-more:link]

A new study in the journal Health Affairs quantifies the trend. In 2004, 45 percent of rural counties lacked a hospital with obstetrics services. About one in 10 rural counties lost those services over the next decade, and by 2014, 54 percent of communities lacked those services. That leaves 2.4 million women of child-bearing age living in counties without hospitals that deliver babies.There are already a slew of well-known health disparities between rural women and those who live in urban settings. [node:read-more:link]