Agriculture

The House Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill would strip billions in nutrition benefits from American families, rural residents are more likely than metropolitan ones to be participating in the program. Conventional Beltway wisdom is that farm bills pass Congress with relative ease from a rare bipartisan coalition of rural legislators delivering farm programs for their constituencies while urban legislators gain nutrition assistance and food aid in the cities. [node:read-more:link]

The University of California will argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to overturn the February 2017 ruling of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and reinstate the interference regarding the patent rights for CRISPR-Cas9.A research team led by UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and former University of Vienna professor Emmanuelle Charpentier was the first to invent methods for using CRISPR-Cas9 outside its natural environment. [node:read-more:link]

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, dairying in New England was in crisis. Small farms were faced with a lack of demand for agricultural labor, according to Vermont Representative Peter Conlon, 53. Conlon, who was born and raised in Vermont, worked as a dairy labor specialist for ten years with Agri-Placement, a company that offers employee placement and support services for dairy farms. “Americans have, by and large, walked away from doing this kind of job,” Conlon said. [node:read-more:link]

The Senate Appropriations Committee has added an emergency rescue package to help struggling dairy farmers get through a very difficult year so far in 2018. Wholesale milk prices remain below the cost of production for many northeast dairy operations. "Help is on the way," said Sen. [node:read-more:link]

Americans say they care more about animal welfare than children’s education and hunger. That’s according to the findings of the “Causes Americans Care About,” a new study that gathered responses from 1,000 adults, 41% of which chose animal welfare number one. Children’s education ranked second with 38% of respondents, followed by hunger, chosen by 33% of respondents.  The top five causes Americans care about in 2018 is rounded out by disease research (No. 4) and disaster relief (No. 5), which bumped the environment out of the top five to the No. 6 position this year. [node:read-more:link]

Toronto-based Flashfood and Tyson Innovation Lab have partnered up to “stop food waste and save money.” The two companies’ new initiative to offer food boxes, called flashfoodbox, to the Detroit metro market was launched on April 22, Earth Day.
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Amid the Trump administration’s vocal efforts to crack down on the hiring of undocumented immigrants, little attention has been paid to a federal program that, if used uniformly, could go a long way toward stopping the practice. E-Verify — which is run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and matches job applicants and federal immigration data — has been touted as a solution to helping employers determine whether a potential hire is legally entitled to work in the United States. [node:read-more:link]

A group of Arkansas farmers had little more than a week of access to dicamba before the state Supreme Court intervened on Wednesday, April 25. [node:read-more:link]

Bayer AG agreed to sell more crop science businesses to BASF in a deal that fulfils undertakings to the European Union and other regulators as part of its takeover of Monsanto Co. [node:read-more:link]

Animals can play a very important role assisting people with disabilities and as part of therapeutic activities. Most people are aware of the role of service animals, such as guide dogs, but other types of assistance animals may be less familiar. A more recently developed legal category of assistance animals is the emotional support animal (ESA). These are animals that provide companionship and emotional support for people diagnosed with a psychological disorder. [node:read-more:link]