Agriculture

"If a major hurricane approaches Central Florida this season, Maria knows it’s dangerous to stay inside her wooden, trailer-like home. In past storms, she evacuated to her sister’s sturdier house. If she couldn’t get there, a shelter set up at the local high school served as a refuge if needed. But with accelerating detentions and deportations of immigrants across her community of Apopka, 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of Orlando, Maria, an agricultural worker from Mexico without permanent U.S. legal status, doesn’t know if those options are safe."

"The Agriculture Department is curtailing its support for solar and wind energy on farmlands."

"A commercially valuable but unpronounceable toxicant with multiple chemical variations is being increasingly found at harmful levels in Michigan waters. Sound familiar? It’s not PFAS or PCBs this time. Now, it’s neonicotinoids, or “neonics” — a type of synthetic pesticide that’s widely used on corn and soybeans."

"Dozens of dust events probably happen each year across the 120-square-mile playa once covered by the Great Salt Lake. But there are no comprehensive state or federal records of them."

"A Texas-based federal judge assented to a Trump administration request Tuesday and ended Endangered Species Act protections for the lesser prairie chicken."

"One of the largest deer-smuggling networks in the state’s history aimed to skirt chronic wasting disease-containment rules, officials say." 

"Syngenta is another step closer to potentially putting an end to thousands of lawsuits brought by people blaming the company’s paraquat weed killer for causing Parkinson’s disease."

"President Donald Trump should block the U.S. House from limiting the regulation of pesticides and "forever chemicals" in its environmental appropriations bill or risk losing Republican support, more than 200 activists aligned with the "Make America Healthy Again" movement said in a letter to Trump."

"France’s highest court on Thursday blocked a key part of a contentious farming law that would have brought back a banned pesticide."

"The Fish and Wildlife Service will have to reconsider whether gray wolves in the western United States merit Endangered Species Act protections in light of Republican-backed efforts to aggressively cull the animals in the Northern Rockies, a federal judge ruled Tuesday."