Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/corn/)
The Trump administration has formally revised a proposal that would significantly restrict the type of research that can be used to draft environmental and public health regulations, a measure that experts say amounts to one of the government’s most far-reaching restrictions on science.
Based on a midyear survey, the USDA estimates there were 2.023 million farms in the nation in 2019, a tiny decline of 5,800 farms from the previous year. The change is more dramatic when the time frame is widened — there are 3% fewer farms now than there were in 2014, and the amount of farmland, 897.4 million acres, or 1.4 million square miles, fell by 1.3% during that five-year period.
ROLLETTE, ND - Driving through Rollette County, North Dakota in mid-January, there are places the corn can be seen popping out of snow drifts piling up on the edges of the field. Squares of brown, unharvested fields dot the otherwise white, flat landscape. That corn wasn’t supposed to be there at all. It should have been harvested by October. “USDA calls that ‘on-farm storage’,” Ryan Pederson said, laughing as he drove past his unharvested corn.
The closing days of 2019 find small farms pummeled from every side: a trade war, severe weather associated with climate change, tanking commodity prices related to globalization and political polarization. It is the worst crisis in decades.
Severe weather and flooding that impacted much of the Midwest are expected to cause multinational agribusiness company Archer Daniels Midland to lose millions of dollars.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has extended use of pest control substance, dicamba, until December 20, 2020. What are the new regulations for extended use of the herbicide?
The weather that led to the below-average conditions could be a preview of future climate conditions, according to a new study from the University of Illinois.
The drought of 2012 was the worst since at least 1988, spanning the entire Corn Belt, from Ohio to Wyoming, and costing the agribusiness industry billions of dollars.
Since 2000, the percentage of genetically engineered corn planted in the United States has grown from 25 percent to 92 percent in 2016. But unless yields increase significantly, experts say the world will not be able to grow enough food to feed itself by 2050, with food shortages anticipated as soon as 2030.
A new U.S. Department of Agriculture report released in mid-January has found that greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing corn-based ethanol are about 43 percent lower than gasoline.