Farming, Farmers | featured news

In 2012, farmers harvested less than three-fourths of the expected corn crop.

The world urgently need to adopt drought-management policies as farmers from Africa to India struggle with lack of rainfall and the United States endures the worst drought it has experienced in decades, top officials with the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday.

With water increasingly scarce in the West, a new program is allowing some farmers to sell their allotment of it for whatever price they can find, but it comes with a hitch... They can continue to farm all their land, or they can stop farming some of it and earn more than $500 an acre — more than the market value of a crop like alfalfa in a given year — simply by not using the water required to nourish those crops. Water saved is sent on to thirsty cities and suburbs to the west: San Diego, Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

The US government will spend up to $760 million to compensate American Indian farmers who were unfairly denied loans by the Agriculture Department, the Obama administration announced on Tuesday.

Under the program, the chain will invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-sized farmers and measure the efficiency of large suppliers in growing and getting their produce to market.

Officials are looking into the gaps between what farmers earn and what shoppers pay at the grocery store. The Justice Department and the USDA pledge an examination of alleged monopolistic practices.

U.S. Atty. Gen.

The Brazilian government announces trade sanctions against US imports in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers.

From the fields of Idaho to tasting rooms in suburban Chicago, potato farmers, researchers and industry representatives are in the midst of an elusive hunt: finding a new spud for McDonald's french fries.

Four generations of Saylors have worked the family's dairy farm for nearly a century, but for the past three years, the cows have been doing something besides providing milk: They've been helping power the place.

Indian farmers -- desperate for rain -- have asked their unmarried daughters to plow dry fields naked, in a bid to spark interest from the weather gods, and bring some badly needed monsoon rain.