Free Republic

The case in Andrews County included an infested dog. Another case included a goat in Gillespie County. by Three more cases of New World screwworm were confirmed in Texas by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday, bringing the total number of cases to five. One new case is in Andrews County, nearly 400 miles north of Zavala County, where the first case was reported last week. The new cases are in different animals. In La Salle County, about 80 miles southeast of Zavala, a calf has been infected. In Andrews County, a veterinarian submitted the samples from an infested...

Australian beef exports to China could be hit with a 55 per cent tariff within days. Earlier this year, Beijing announced a quota on Australian beef of 205,000 tonnes a year...

Karell Reader’s heart sank when she saw acres of apple trees piled up on her neighbor’s Watsonville farm last month. Her neighbor used to sell apples to California cider empire S. Martinelli & Company, but he was forced to bulldoze dozens of apple trees after the company canceled his contracts. For farmers in Pajaro Valley, a fertile region between Monterey and Santa Cruz, growing and selling Newtown pippin apples to Martinelli’s had been a lifeline for over a century. But now, apple farmers like Reader’s neighbor are scrambling to find solutions after the 158-year-old company blindsided them by canceling their...

FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (FOX26) — A woman was arrested after an investigation near an orchard revealed stolen fruit and drug paraphernalia on Tuesday, deputies say. A Fresno County Deputy was on patrol in the area between Kingsburg and Parlier, noticed a car pulling out of a nectarine orchard near the intersection of Zediker and Rose avenues around 2 a.m. The deputy stopped the car and contacted the driver, 40-year-old Zulema Garcia Cruz. Garcia Cruz was arrested for having outstanding warrants for drug possession and petty theft. During a further search of the orchard, the deputy found a pickup truck with...

Here’s another painful reminder to never follow the leftists who smugly told us to “follow the science”: The Democratic Party of Wisconsin can’t seem to tell a cow from a bull. That’s not only embarrassing in America’s Dairyland, such confusion during milking could prove fatal. In a now-deleted social media post, the party welcomed National Dairy Month with an image of wispy white clouds, blues skies, and two beefy bulls. As others in my beloved purple home state have helpfully pointed out, you can’t milk a bull. And, again, pity the fool who tries. Actually, the mistake is quite fitting...

Abraham Enriquez, who is in the runoff for Texas’s 19th Congressional District, said his campaign is rooted in faith, coalition building, and bringing West Texas values to Washington. “I’ve had the honor of organizing and creating an organization, not based out in DC, not based out in Austin, based out right here in West Texas, that today has grown into one of the largest organizations that has brought in over a million new evangelical Christians into the Republican coalition. That organization has also been a partner to the Domestic Policy Council of the White House, both Trump Administration One and...

The Trump administration and GOP lawmakers are seeking to win over U.S. farmers, a core constituency for the president during his 2016 and 2024 White House wins that has been aggravated by rising prices caused by his trade policies and the Iran war. Ahead of a midterm election season where the GOP is working to win every vote it can, the White House and its allies in Congress are reaching out to farmers in red and blue states alike. On the way back from Beijing after his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump assured farmers that they would...

During a 15 May 2026 interview, the president discussed maintaining foreign enrolment. He argued institutions rely on international tuition.Speaking to Fox News presenter Sean Hannity on 'Hannity', he articulated his perspective. 'But if you don't have those students — good students, by the way — if you don't ... if they're good and they want to stay in America, we won't give them a green card and things like that,' Trump explained… 'Frankly, I think that it's good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture, and many of them want to stay here. I think it's...

It's no secret in Hong Kong that I was with my boss (Jimmy Lai, the owner of Apple Daily) and a few others recently walking the halls of government in Washington D.C. Saw Speaker Pelosi and other leaders in the House and Senate. Visited the State Department. Met some folks from administration, the think tanks, and of course always see the very switched on human rights groups. This week I shot down to D.C. and saw a few folks in a follow-up. All staffs and officials. Working level folks have best info. Both trips to D.C. were in regard to...

Dark earth, the strange patches of black soil rich in nutrients that cause plants to grow at accelerated rates, while also capturing unusually high amounts of carbon from the air, is one of the Amazon rainforest’s greatest mysteries. Since these patches of dark earth were first discovered by European colonizers in the 1880s, debate has raged over their origins, with ideas ranging from the natural to the artificial. Variants of this dark, nutrient-rich soil have been found in a range of locations around the world, and are most often associated with the accumulation of materials in soil after long periods...

[...] “You may still be seeing the inflationary impact of food industry costs for the next 12 to 15 months,” he said. [...] If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the importance of fertiliser. Some 40-50 per cent of the world’s food production depends on artificial nitrogen-based fertiliser, which is created by combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas to make ammonia. In turn, this is combined with either nitric acid or carbon dioxide to produce ammonium nitrate, or urea. The problem is that 34 per cent of global urea passes through the Strait of Hormuz, having been produced...

Today, just four companies — JBS, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and National Beef — control roughly 85% of the cattle processing market. That level of concentration has surged from just 25% in 1977 to 71% by 1992, and now to an astonishing 85%. Together, these companies operate through dozens of subsidiary businesses, creating a landscape that leaves many of our cattle producers with limited marketing options. For some ranchers this means less marketing opportunities, complicating an already challenging marketplace. We must work to address this to protect our ranchers and consumers. @POTUS and this administration are focused on promoting fairness and...

Phys.org reports that wheat for baking bread (Triticum aestivum) may have first been grown some 8,000 years ago in Georgia. Genetic studies of modern wheat plants and wild grasses indicate that domesticated wheat and wild goat grass were mixed in the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region. This hybrid plant eventually became bread wheat, explained Nana Rusishvili of the Georgia National Museum and her colleagues. They examined charred grains recovered from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, two Neolithic village sites in Georgia. Because charred grains of bread wheat look similar to durum wheat and other wheat seeds, the team...

Paleoanthropologists from the University of Vienna and Harvard University have analyzed ancient DNA from 435 individuals from Eurasian archaeological sites... They've discovered a previously unknown group, called Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) people, and found out that this population can be connected to all Indo-European-speaking populations.Indo-European languages, which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today...These migrations out of the steppes had the largest effect on European human genomes of any demographic event in the last 5,000 years and are widely regarded as the probable vector...

FORT WORTH, TEXAS — A long-time cattle rancher said Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration understands his industry and what it needs to continue producing quality beef for the American people. Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) Director Steve Sikes told Breitbart News that under past administrations, ranchers were pressured by rules that made their work more difficult, but things have since changed. “We’ve got the EPA that is run pretty well, and in the past that was always a deterrent for ranchers because they were putting in rules that were almost impossible to cope with. They had a...

Four hundred inquiries from American farmers poured in after a single interview. Not for a John Deere. Not for a Case IH. For a tractor built in Alberta with a remanufactured 1990s diesel engine and zero electronics. Ursa Ag, a small Canadian manufacturer, is assembling tractors powered by 12-valve Cummins engines — the same mechanically injected workhorses that powered combines and pickup trucks decades ago — and selling them for roughly half the price of comparable machines from established brands. The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-topping 260-hp version runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000. Try...

Fourth-generation Iowa farmer Mark Mueller is no stranger to the ups and downs of the agriculture industry. But right now, he thinks America is on the cusp of a farm crisis. “I am more concerned now than I have been in my 30 years of farming,” Mueller told NBC News. Even before the Iran war, Mueller said, many farmers felt they were being squeezed. Consolidation in the fertilizer industry and increased competition from abroad have resulted in higher prices for fertilizer and feed — and smaller returns on Mueller’s corn and soybean crops. Many farmers who couldn’t pay their bills...

Democrats have made it very clear that one of the reasons they support unfettered illegal immigration is that they want to import a slave-labor class that they can pay cheaply and keep in deplorable working conditions. They prove this every time they argue that, sans illegals, we wouldn't have anyone to clean our toilets or cut our grass and the price of our produce would go up because farmers would have to pay people a living wage to harvest crops (a lot of which is automated these days, anyway). Now the New York Times is playing that card again, this...

The global energy shock triggered by the ongoing Iran war is rippling through the United States farm sector, where soaring input costs are placing US farmers under severe financial strain and raising concerns about future food prices... The closure and instability around the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery for global oil and fertilizer shipments, have pushed fuel prices sharply higher and tightened supplies of key agricultural inputs. The result is a double blow for US farmers already dealing with tight margins. Higher input costs reduce profitability, while uncertainty about supply availability complicates planting decisions. In some cases, farmers are...

Double-check all sources, experts say es are warning the public about a multi-state scam targeting the immigrant community, with some victims losing as much as $30,000. According to Claudia Abasto Rivilla, founder and executive director of Salinas-based Latin Advocacy Network (LATINAN), scammers target Spanish- and Indigenous-language speakers using information gleaned from social media. They then use stolen identities and fake legal credentials to appear legitimate, she said. With an already tenuous legal status, victims are often too afraid to seek help or report the crime. Abasto said victims typically seek help only after being defrauded. She also said she...