Brazil's government approved taxing ethanol imports for the first time in a move to protect local producers from growing shipments coming from the United States.Brazil's Agriculture Ministry said the country's foreign trade chamber, known as Camex, approved a 20-percent tax on ethanol imports, which would be levied only after a tax-free quota of 600 million liters per year is surpassed.Brazilian ethanol imports reached 1.29 billion liters in the first half of the year alone, a 330 percent increase compared to the same period a year earlier.The move ends an agreement between the world's two [node:read-more:link]

Vegetarian men showed more symptoms of depression than non-vegetarians, possibly due to nutritional deficiencies, a University of Bristol study said. Researchers analyzed data from 9,668 men in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children in southwest England, of which 350 identified themselves as vegetarians. Those who were vegetarian for a longer period of time tended to have higher depression scores. [node:read-more:link]

Tracking legal weed from the fields and greenhouses where it’s grown to the shops where it’s sold is their main protective measure so far. [node:read-more:link]

With recreational marijuana use just months away from being legal in California, Los Angeles has appointed a so-called cannabis czar tasked with regulating the local pot industry. [node:read-more:link]

The California Department of Food and Agriculture is offering nearly $7 million in competitive grants to assist farmers and ranchers with such soil health projects as composting, planting cover crops and reducing tillage. [node:read-more:link]

The extended-family farm operation is what many imagine is dotting Iowa's countryside — fathers and sons, husbands and wives, working together to raise animals, crops and kids.But that picture is changing rapidly, as family-run midsized farms give way to bigger agriculture operations and smaller hobby acreages.Farm consolidation has emptied out rural Iowa for decades. [node:read-more:link]

Although immigrant workers have long been employed on U.S. farms, shifting migration patterns and employer labor strategies are reshaping the agricultural workforce. Migration from Mexico to the United States has slowed with the the 2008–09 recession, improving conditions in rural Mexico, and stepped-up border enforcement.With fewer new arrivals, the agricultural workforce is aging, settling down, and forming or reuniting families, as this analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) shows. [node:read-more:link]

Just a few miles from the Maryland- Pennsylvania border lies the Conowingo Dam, an 88-year-old power station stopping the massive Susquehanna River, which is the source of much of the freshwater flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. Since bay cleanup began, states in the Chesapeake watershed have relied on the dam to limit the flow of sediment and phosphorous further downstream, and the plan was to continue doing so for decades to come. But the dam's sediment pools are full, long before the cleanup plan projected them to be. [node:read-more:link]

The Sierra Club sued the Energy Department on Monday to release the names of groups and experts that the department consulted while developing a yet-to-be-released study on electric grid reliability. "We want to make sure that when this study is finally released, that the public and policy makers fully understand how it went about doing it, who they were influenced by, and whose views they did not take into consideration," said Casey Roberts, a lawyer with the environmental group. [node:read-more:link]

In July a federal trial court struck down the Utah farm protection law as unconstitutional. A host of supporters and critics of such laws are closely watching what happens next in both the Utah case and in a similar Idaho case pending before a federal appeals court.Observers say the cases will help determine whether other states will join the nine, including Utah and Idaho, that have statues allowing criminal or civil cases against those who carry out undercover operations at animal production facilities. [node:read-more:link]