Hurricane Ike was, thankfully, not as devastating to southeast Texas as originally feared. But, as the New York Times' Kate Murphy reports, one consequence is that 25,000 cows were displaced from their homes.

Now the Texas Dept. of Agriculture is teaming with the non-governmental ...

The New York Times Jesse McKinley reports on how the U.S. Forest Service is contracting out who extinguishes wildfires. The Forest Service, which is under the Dept. of Agriculture, argues that because these fires mostly occur during the summer its only necessary to have firefighters ...

The Associated Press reports that the United States Dept. of Agriculture has recalled 160,000 more pounds of beef produced by Nebraska Beef Ltd. This brings the Nebraska Beef meat recalled to 1.36 million pounds-- all because the company's production practices don't effectively guard against E coli.

The Nebraska Beef has caused ...

The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reports that the United States Dept. of Agriculture is considering whether to plow 1.2 million acres of land previously set aside for conservation. Currently farmers are getting paid not to harvest this land in the ...

The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee gives us all the zany details about a four-year battle between the U.S. Forest Service and Rep. Henry Brown (R-S.C.). Brown has paid a $4,700 fine to the Dept. of Agriculture’s Forest Service after a burn from his South Carolina tree farm spread into a ...

Global warming is already causing forest fires, snowpacks and droughts in the U.S. and is affecting hundreds of animal species. So says a report from the Dept. of Agriculture’s U.S. Climate Science Program. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin quotes Richard Moss, the former ...

Dept. of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told reporters yesterday that downer cattle, which cannot stand up on their own, would be banned from slaughterhouses. The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee reports that the ban comes after a California slaughterhouse was videotaped in January abusing cows and then using prods to make ...

A Government Accountability Office report released last week slammed the Dept of Agriculture as still not confronting its decades-long record of discrimination. GAO says the Dept lacks even credible data about the number of bias complaints it has received from both minority farmers and its own federal employees. Class ...

The non-profit, non-government National Trust for Historic Preservation will release a report today saying that only a fraction of America’s two million “cultural resources” are being properly maintained. The Dept. of Agriculture’s Forest Service has the job of preserving these cultural sites. They include civil war battlefields and Native American ...

The latest consequence of the growing economic morass: 28 million Americans are expected to be on food stamps this year. The news, though, is not all bad. The New York Times's Erick Eckholm reports that states have been successfully promoting the availability of the Department ...