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The Biden administration will be naming Alexis Taylor, a former deputy undersecretary at USDA, to be the department’s top trade official, sources informed of the decision tell Agri-Pulse.

Farmers are struggling this spring with sky-high production costs, but the bigger concern is whether there will be enough fertilizer and other inputs to go around for next season

U.S. potato shipments are for the first time reaching Mexican importers beyond the 26-kilometer limit established by Mexico years ago, marking the start of increased trade that will boost U.S. exports by tens of millions of dollars, according to USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

The Agriculture Department estimates U.S. winter wheat production will drop 8% this year due to a drought gripping the Plains and that planting delays are likely to cut the corn harvest.

Ukrainian farmers will begin harvesting millions of acres of winter wheat in July, but if Ukraine is unable to export it, the country’s economy will likely collapse and the hundreds of millions of people that depend on receiving that grain will suffer even worse than they are now, United Nations World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said Wednesday.

President Joe Biden is taking new steps to address spikes in food prices and ag inputs after lawmakers declined to include his proposed crop incentives in a $40 billion supplemental spending bill for the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian farmers are short on diesel, fertilizer and manpower. They’ve been bombed, occupied, had their fields mined and silos and tractors destroyed by the Russian military. They've even had their grain robbed and sold overseas while they themselves are struggling to export because of a Russian blockade at ports, sources tell Agri-Pulse.

The Senate is beginning negotiations with the House over legislation aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness abroad, even as there are new signs of division among senators over trade policy, including whether to fully reinstate an exclusion process on Section 301 tariffs on imports from China. 

Proposed regulations that could require public corporations to start reporting on the greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chains would saddle producers with significant costs and threaten the privacy of farm data, according to an analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The U.S. exported about $49.2 billion worth of ag commodities in the first quarter of 2022, a record for shipments in the first three months of a year and setting the pace for what could be an annual record, according to new data from USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.