agriculture

China’s biggest soybean grower - the northeastern province of Heilongjiang - plans to increase the area planted to the crop by 10 million mu (666,667 hectares) in 2022, the official Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

Ukraine’s government will prepare measures to help domestic food producers, including bakers, cope with a rise in gas prices, Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said on Friday.

Fast-food chain McDonald's has announced that it will reduce its portions of fries in Japan for a week because of logistical problems related to the floods in Canada and the pandemic.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) will lend Nigeria $210 million to support smallholder farmers producing strategic crops and livestock, the bank said on Tuesday.

This week's U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) report finds continued deterioration in drought-like conditions across areas of the Mid-Atlantic (Virginia, North Carolina) and the Southeast (South Carolina, Georgia) in response to below-normal precipitation (past 30- to 90-day period), declining soil moisture and streamflow levels. 

Consultancy Strategie Grains sharply cut its demand forecast for European Union wheat in 2021/22 as high prices were seen eroding exports and leading industrial processors to switch to maize.

As the first week of the United Nations, Climate Change Conference (COP26) winds down, a new analysis of emissions-reduction pledges finds that those countries that have contributed the most to climate change have committed to do far too little to reduce emissions from the food system and leverage the carbon sequestration potential of landscapes.

Although soybeans are the traditional cornerstone of U.S. agricultural exports to China, corn has proven the most valuable player so far this year as shipments have shattered previous highs.

Namibia suspended imports of live poultry, birds and poultry products from Germany and the Netherlands on Monday after outbreaks of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu in the European countries.

Rodent pests have been a problem for crop-growers since Neolithic farmers pioneered planting wheat, millet, and spelled, and humans have been teaming up with raptors to hunt small prey for thousands of years. More recently, the “if you build it, they will come” idea has persuaded Malaysians to erect barn owl nest boxes on palm oil plantations, Kenyan maize farmers to install nest boxes and raptor perches, and Israelies to put 1,500 nest boxes in agricultural fields as part of a national program. Over the last two decades, farmers throughout the United States have increasingly turned to raptors to reduce the rodents that damage their crops.