California can require Monsanto to label its popular weed-killer Roundup as a possible cancer threat despite an insistence from the chemical giant that it poses no risk to people, a judge tentatively ruled. California would be the first state to order such labeling if it carries out the proposal. [node:read-more:link]
Today’s college farms are not simply research facilities as they have been in the past. College farms provide students with hands-on experience in the growth of crops and animals. Students are able to learn more about how plants thrive, what can damage their growth and how best to maximize yield in a crop. The life-cycle of animals is demonstrated first-hand, providing information for all types of career paths, including veterinary medicine and pharmaceutical development. Campus farms also provide benefits to the community. [node:read-more:link]
Rural America has backed Republicans for decades, but it gave unusually strong support to Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy, with Iowa scoring the biggest D-to-R shift of any state in the union. It’s interesting, then, that one of the segments of the business community with the biggest concern about Trump’s policies is agribusiness. This sector enjoys traditional Republican priorities like lax environmental regulation and eliminating the estate tax, but could suffer enormously from trade wars that Trump might initiate. [node:read-more:link]
Doug Palen, a fourth-generation grain farmer on Kansas’ wind-swept plains, is in the business of understanding the climate. Since 2012, he has choked through the harshest drought to hit the Great Plains in a century, punctuated by freakish snowstorms and suffocating gales of dust. His planting season starts earlier in the spring and pushes deeper into winter. To adapt, he has embraced an environmentally conscious way of farming that guards against soil erosion and conserves precious water. [node:read-more:link]
A case filed by Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) involving financial damages from treatment of this water recently made its way to the Iowa Supreme Court. On Friday, January 27, the Iowa Supreme Court resolved one issue associated with the DMWW case; however, non-point source permitting issues under the Clean Water Act will still be considered by a trial court in June. [node:read-more:link]
Small business drives the rural economy. Rural areas that don’t have the infrastructure and population to draw in big business, support thriving small businesses. Over the last 30 years small businesses created over eight million new jobs. Fifty-five percent of all U.S. jobs are with small businesses. In Ohio, the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry has an 87 percent small business employment share. Mom’s diner and Pop’s bait shop create a sense of place for community members. [node:read-more:link]
The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development has been working to ensure that Tennessee is the No. 1 state in the Southeast for high quality jobs and succeeding. In the past two years, TNECD has received nearly 50,000 job commitments from expanding or relocating businesses that have committed nearly $11 billion capital investment in our state. [node:read-more:link]
There’s a phrase that more and more people are using at the state Capitol, and not everybody says it with a country twang.
Rural Georgia.
Lawmakers are talking about the problems that plague some of Georgia’s smaller communities. Main Street businesses that have closed. Financially struggling hospitals. Poor internet connections. Schools that don’t offer all the classes that will help students get into the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech. Young people moving to cities and never coming back. [node:read-more:link]
The Washington beef industry wants lawmakers to exempt cattle feedlots from the state Clean Air Act, complaining the Department of Ecology has adopted a no-tolerance stance on dust rising from thousands of animals in dry conditions. “They have adopted what I would call a new no-tolerance interpretation as it relates to dust,” Agri Beef director of regulatory affairs Jayne Davis told the House Environment Committee on Monday. [node:read-more:link]
Farm subsidy programs have little impact on food consumption, food security, or nutrition in the United States, despite occasional claims to the contrary. The modern era of federal farm commodity subsidies began with the New Deal more than 80 years ago. Farm subsidies and related land retirements, market regulations, and trade policies have an array of small and offsetting impacts on farm commodity prices. When filtered through the supply chain, their impacts on retail prices and food consumption are surely tiny. [node:read-more:link]
