President Joe Biden released a fiscal 2022 budget outline Friday that includes a $3.8 billion increase for the Agriculture Department that is heavily directed toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making farms and forests more resilient to climate change.

Democrats are moving to provide unprecedented amounts of debt relief and other assistance to Black farmers and other minority producers as part of a $1.9 trillion stimulus package that's being designed to address racial justice as well as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

President-elect Joe Biden is out with a $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal that includes some significant new food assistance provisions, including an extension through the summer of the 15% increase in SNAP benefits provided by the COVID aid package enacted in December.

The Democratic Party’s draft 2020 platform calls for directing more farm subsidies to small and medium-size farms while making the agriculture sector the first in the first world to eliminate net carbon emissions.

The National Milk Producers Federation and International Dairy Foods Association are jointly asking USDA to rescue the industry from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by paying farms to cut production and providing forgivable loans to processors to keep buying milk.

Food-insecure households in the United States, defined as those who “had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources,” declined to prerecession levels last year, USDA's Economic Research Service reported Wednesday.

The Agriculture Department is closing county Farm Service Agency offices after Friday and will suspend publication of some new reports and take others offline with the partial government shutdown set to drag into the new year.