Marking the 51st anniversary of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) this week, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue today asked for input from the public to help determine potential updates to the law’s licensing requirements.  The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is tasked with upholding and enforcing the AWA.  The AWA was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on August 24, 1966. [node:read-more:link]

Several federal lawmakers from Massachusetts joined other Washington lawmakers on Wednesday urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide dairy farmers with relief and new insurance. The two congressman who represent Franklin County in the U.S. House of Representatives, James McGovern and Richard Neal, and U.S. senators from Massachusetts, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, joined 19 others including Sens. [node:read-more:link]

The Environmental Defense Fund opened an office near Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., 10 years ago. It was part of a carefully plotted strategy to persuade the giant retailer that going green could be good for business. [node:read-more:link]

A chronic shortage of large animal veterinarians is an oft-repeated mantra as to why Texas needs a second school. The 85th Texas Legislature, which convened this past January, agreed that the idea for a second veterinary college in Texas—Texas A&M is presently the only one—warranted a closer look.As a result, the Legislature earmarked $4.1 million in the current state budget for further study of the project’s feasibility. [node:read-more:link]

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development will deploy $4.7 million for its Food and Agriculture Investment Program, which it operated as a pilot project in the current fiscal year.  Officials believe the program will become a mainstay in Michigan’s economic development toolbox because it helps fill funding gaps for agribusiness expansion projects that do not meet the requirements for traditional performance-based grants from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. [node:read-more:link]

John Gilliland penned a blistering attack on the Heritage Foundation's view of agricultural trade. Heritage claims U.S. farm policy is harmful and hurts trade liberalization. It asserts “…U.S. farmers would be better off if U.S. policy were unilaterally eliminated.” Gilliland notes that “Many countries subsidize farm production, but nearly all maintain a regime of tariff and non-tariff barriers.” He suggests “No other sector of the U.S. economy faces a greater variety of government-sanctioned competitive challenges.” He claims the U.S. [node:read-more:link]

An analysis of data from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) found that SNAP benefits accounted for over 60 percent of the average SNAP household’s food-at-home expenditures. SNAP benefits played a strong role in the food budgets of households with children and those in deep poverty.FoodAPS data revealed that more than 20 percent of the time that food was acquired, it was acquired for free. [node:read-more:link]

Designing or modifying voluntary agricultural programs involves deciding between many design options; testing the options with economic experiments can be a cost-effective tool for developing evidence about which work best. [node:read-more:link]

The Trump administration has fired another shot at the scientific community, this time dismantling a federal advisory committee on climate change.Members on the 15-person committee tell CNN they learned the news by email Friday. [node:read-more:link]

Agriculture has historically released almost as much carbon into the atmosphere as deforestation, a new study suggests — and that’s saying something. In a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that land use changes associated with planting crops and grazing livestock have caused a loss of 133 billion tons of carbon from soil worldwide over the last 12,000 years, amounting to about 13 years of global emissions at their current levels. [node:read-more:link]