USDA Blog

It takes a village to get those red ripe watermelon or sweet ears of corn to the neighborhood grocery store at the right time for consumers. Producers must decide when to plant and pick crops, package produce, find buyers and select the right shipper to transport products to market. Hundreds of...

Imagine walking into your local grocery store on a frigid January day to pick up freshly harvested lettuce, fragrant basil, juicy sweet strawberries, and ripe red tomatoes – all of which were harvested at a local farm only hours before you’d arrived. You might be imagining buying that fresh produce...

In small towns from Maine to California, access to reliable, high-speed internet is a foundation for rural prosperity. From quality health care to advanced education and precision ag technology at the local farm equipment dealer, e-connectivity is a lifeline to the modern economy. And, yet we know...

More than 80 million acres of national forests are at risk from insect infestations, the impacts of prolonged drought, and the too frequent devastation caused by catastrophic wildfire. And the USDA Forest Service has a responsibility to the American public to move quickly and cost-effectively to...

My mother has a jar in her kitchen with the phrase, “Cooking is love made visible.” I can say for a fact that her food spreads a lot of love, and I think the same could be said about school food service professionals.

Fusarium head blight is a devastating fungal disease affecting wheat and barley crops worldwide. According to the American Phytopathological Society, this disease has cost U.S. wheat and barley farmers more than $3 billion since 1990. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, together with...

I once lived in a home where fighting lawn weeds seemed a never-ending task. This was a new housing development. Pickets tied with bits of pink ribbon still clearly showed where our property began and ended, and they were handy for helping me determine where I could put in my fence and where I could...

Summer is a great time for kids to get outside and be physically active. But for those days that are spent indoors, Nutrition.gov’s Children section has solutions to keep children busy and encourage healthy lifestyle habits.

USDA has committed to becoming a facts-based, data-driven, customer-focused organization. One of the Department’s two Agency Priority Goals (APGs) for FY18-19 is to develop the USDA Chief Executive Officer (CXO) Dashboards, which integrate data from systems spanning the agency’s 29 agencies and...

The face of poverty has often been associated with the starving child in the slums of New Delhi, India or streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. While this is the reality for many children across the developing world, rural and urban poverty is often overlooked in developed countries, such as the United...