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]

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]