Agriculture | featured news

Left unchecked, climate change aligned with population explosion and low agricultural yields will drastically increase global poverty and hunger over the next two decades, warns the international aid organization Oxfam in a report released today ...

Watermelons have been bursting by the score in eastern China after farmers gave them overdoses of growth chemicals during wet weather, creating what state media called fields of "land mines."

Export growth is propelled by higher prices for many products, including wheat, whose prices have skyrocketed as drought and heat struck Russia.

Ousted Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday she will sue a conservative blogger who posted an edited video of her making racially tinged remarks last week. Sherrod was forced to resign last week as director of rural development in Georgia after Andrew Breitbart posted the edited video online. In the full video, Sherrod, who is black, spoke to a local NAACP group about racial reconciliation and overcoming her initial reluctance to help a white farmer.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack rushed to judgment when he dismissed a former government official over racism allegations, U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview on Thursday.

Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official, also says she believes she deserves a telephone call from President Obama.

Federal health officials, concerned about the growing problem of superbugs, took a tentative step toward banning a common agricultural use of penicillin and tetracycline.

The mystery started the day farmer Russ Kremer got between a jealous boar and a sow in heat. The boar gored Kremer in the knee with a razor-sharp tusk. The burly pig farmer shrugged it off, figuring: "You pour the blood out of your boot and go on."