Brandon Lipps and Pam Miller have new roles at the Department of Agriculture, and USDA will have another mission area led by deputy undersecretary rather than a Senate-confirmed official.

Producers utilized a listening session featuring two of the most influential men in ag policy to express their displeasure with the state of affairs for rural America, putting them in a mode that varied between explanatory and defensive.

The Agriculture Department has the legal authority to move the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City, but USDA may not have the authority to spend money on the relocation, USDA's inspector general says.

The Agriculture Department overhauled its Market Facilitation Program to broaden the number of farmers that would receive the trade aid, but officials may encounter new grumbling over the wide disparities in county payment rates.

Qualifying producers will get payments ranging from $15 to $150 an acre under this year's version of the Market Facilitation Program, with rates varying widely by county and region.

Farmers who qualify for the upcoming round of trade assistance payments will get at least $15 an acre, says Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who will release additional details of the Market Facilitation Program later in the week.

In its latest effort to shrink enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Trump administration is proposing to remove up to 3 million people from the rolls by tightening eligibility rules that allow many states to sign up people with incomes that exceed federal limits.

Fewer than 150 employees of the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture have agreed to move to the Kansas City region, where their agencies are being relocated, according to USDA.

More than a dozen Republican senators are demanding that President Donald Trump bar Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue from having any input into whether small refineries get exemptions from biofuel usage mandates.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue tried to sell the Kansas City region as an attractive new home for employees of the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture at an “all-hands” meeting Thursday to brief those agencies’ employees. But some weren’t buying it.