USDA Blog

Cross-posted from the WhiteHouse.gov blog: There’s an exciting trend underway across the country. More and more, major companies are leaving offshore hubs and turning to rural communities in America for high-quality IT talent. In addition to a narrowing wage gap and higher quality of work in these...

Pablo Chacón, a young Guatemalan farmer who is studying agroforestry at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica, can now show the people in his home community how livestock grazing and hardwood forests can co-exist and prosper. Earlier this...

Have you been to a supermarket to buy a carton of eggs lately? If so, you may have found an array of food marketing claims on the packages. All natural, organic, cage-free, pasture-raised, free range, non-GMO, raised without antibiotics, Omega-3 enriched and vegetarian-fed diet are just a small...

International trade is a key factor in the economic and financial stability of many countries. Trade restrictions resulting from an animal disease outbreak can have devastating economic effects. With this in mind, USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service signed three international...

Five years ago, Christy Carr seemed like a long shot as a future homeowner. She was a newly divorced, unemployed mom of five, and her credit score was in the 300’s. The home she shared with her children had no heat, no electricity and no running water. A neighbor let Christy run an extension cord to...

There’s certainly a lot of talk about trade this month at USDA. As the U.S. looks to expand connections with Asian nations, American ranchers, growers, and producers are also keeping an eye on potential economic dealings in the Caribbean. I’m joining the discussion to shed light on how the Grain...

Without pollinators, we don’t eat—it’s simple as that—and, at the moment, large numbers of pollinators are dying. With the world’s population projected to exceed 9 billion in just the next 30 years or so, that is not a good position for us to be in. More than 90 species of U.S. specialty crops...

Every year in the U.S. roughly 200 people are killed in as many as 2 million wildlife-vehicle collisions and at a cost of more than $8 billion, according to the Western Transportation Institute. But the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station scientists, along with their...

The United States has free trade agreements (FTAs) with 20 countries around the world and those agreements have expanded export opportunities for U.S. food and agricultural producers. The pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, between the United States and 11 other nations, will provide...

The Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) sponsored a field day on June 2 to talk about growing vegetables in a changing climate. The discussion focused on climate change, its impacts on the farming system, and strategies to effectively adapt through increasing biodiversity on...