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]

The last working farm in Bloomington could become the site of the 2023 World’s Fair.The Minnesota World’s Fair Bid Committee announced Wednesday that if the state wins Expo 2023, it will be held on a 59-acre property nestled between the Mall of America and the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge that has been owned by the same family since 1932. [node:read-more:link]

I picked up two brochures and read through them. One of those showed all of the diseases that feral swine could carry. There were three categories of diseases listed: bacterial diseases, viral diseases, and parasitic diseases. All of the listed diseases can be transmitted to domestic swine, and many of those are transmittable to humans. [node:read-more:link]

Tyson Foods is backing away from its plans to build a new poultry complex in Tonganoxie, Kansas, and instead is looking at other locations to build the $320 million facility. Tyson Foods on September 5 revealed plans to build the poultry complex in Tonganoxie, stating that the complex would include a poultry plant with a capacity to process 1.25 million birds per week, a feed mill and a hatchery. [node:read-more:link]

On a recent summer morning in Mendota, a small farming community in California’s Central Valley, the sun glared down from a cloudless sky. The temperature was heading toward 101 degrees, and it had hit 106 a few days before—not unlike the blistering heat that blanketed much of the West Coast over Labor Day weekend. While that heat wave proved uncomfortable for the Golden State, such extreme temperatures can actually be dangerous for the people who work outside. That’s especially true in the Central Valley, where a major portion of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are grown. [node:read-more:link]

Survey Results at a Glance: • The overall index climbed for month, but remained below growth neutral. Approximately 57.6 percent of bankers reported  rought conditions were having a negative impact on ag-riculture production in their area. • Average yearly cash rents declined by 4.3 percent over the past year to $241 per acre. • On average bankers expect farmland prices to decline by another 3.5 percent over the next year. In August 2016, bank CEOs projected a 6.9 percent decline for next year. [node:read-more:link]