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Ag News

Severe, Widespread, and Unexplained Honey Bee Losses This Winter

California’s almond tree groves are one of the first major crops every year that U.S. honey bee keepers are called on to help with pollination. This year, however, bee keepers will struggle to meet those calls and others this season following a sudden die-off of more than half their colonies this winter. That’s according to a report from bee industry ...
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“Edacious” Seeking to Break the Cycle of Crop Commoditization

Edacious, a Massachusetts-based startup, has developed a rapid testing and data insights platform to measure and map nutrient density in whole foods, including grains and other commodity crops. This platform has the potential to help farmers in the commodity crop space differentiate their products and increase profitability by providing actionable data on nutritional quality.The Edacious platform offers high-throughput, low-cost testing ...
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Net Farm Income to Rise in 2025 Thanks Largely to $31 Billion Disaster Aid Infusion

In its first estimates for farm sector income in 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is forecasting an increase in net farm income of almost +30% over 2024 while net cash farm income is seen climbing nearly +22%. However, a more than +355% rise in government farm payments, mostly in the form of disaster aid, masks expected declines in ...
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I Had No Idea… Battle Over “Border Water” Adds to US-Mexico Tensions

Texas and Mexico share not only a land border but also a shrinking supply of water that farmers and communities on both sides depend on for survival. Prolonged drought, excessive heat, and population growth are all blamed for the growing water crisis that already decimated the South Texas sugar industry and is now coming for citrus growers. Texas officials also ...
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Google’s “Moonshot Factory” Spins Out New AI-Driven Startup“ Heritable Agriculture”

Google works on a lot of seemingly random projects in its “X” division, which is the so-called “moonshot factory” tasked with developing breakthrough technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems. While many never see the light of day, several have been spun off into independent startups. The latest is “Heritable Agriculture,” a biotechnology company using artificial intelligence (AI) ...
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All about the “Chicken Wings”

Americans are expected to eat 1.3 billion chicken wings and drumsticks during Super Bowl LIX this Sunday, according to the National Chicken Council (NCC). To provide some reference, 1.3 billion wings is enough for every man, woman, and child in the United States to eat four wings each, or enough to put 693 wings on every seat of every NFL ...
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What Are the Odds of a Bird Flu Vaccine for U.S. Poultry?

The decimation of U.S. poultry flocks from the ongoing HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) outbreak continues to push egg prices to new heights, with no end in sight. Over 20 million egg-laying hens were lost to the disease in Q4 2024, including over 13 million in December alone. In January, another 14 million birds were lost, representing 6.5% of the ...
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How U.S. Farmers Drained the Midwest Swamps

Across the U.S. Midwest lies an unseen network of cylindrical tiles that solved one of the biggest problems early settlers faced - drainage. In fact, a surprising swath of America’s most fertile farmland was once useless swampland, now transformed by drainage tile first introduced by European settlers back in the 1800s.At the time of U.S. settlement, large proportions of Illinois, ...
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Cutting CH4 Perhaps as Important as Cutting CO2

In the past two decades, the world has mobilized around reducing and sequestering CO2, but CH4 remains critically under-addressed. In fact, many climate experts believe cutting methane is the single most impactful way to prevent planetary warming in our lifetime. “Methanotrophs” are a family of naturally occurring soil microbes that eat methane and transform it into bioavailable nutrients for plants ...
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More Than 40% of Land on Earth is Now Permanently Dry

A recent report from the United Nations shows that an area almost a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to permanently dry – or arid – in the past three decades. Excluding Antarctica, drylands now make up 40.6% of all land on Earth, a +3% increase compared to the earlier 30-year period. Meanwhile, some 77.6% of the ...
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