Supermarket shoppers are seeing something unusual these days: discounts in the meat department. Steak prices have fallen in each of the last three months even as the cost of chicken, pork and most other groceries has gone up. But bargains in the butcher case are likely to be temporary. Severe drought is forcing some cattle ranchers to slaughter livestock early. That's producing a glut of beef in the short term, but it's also likely to lead to higher prices in the future. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 60% of the nation's cattle are affected by drought, including Brady Blackett's herd of angus cattle, which graze in the high desert of south central Utah. - NPR

PFAS, a group of manufactured chemicals commonly used since the 1940s, are called "forever chemicals" for a reason. Bacteria can't eat them; fire can't incinerate them; and water can't dilute them. And, if these toxic chemicals are buried, they leach into surrounding soil, becoming a persistent problem for generations to come. Now, Northwestern University chemists have done the seemingly impossible. Using low temperatures and inexpensive, common reagents, the research team developed a process that causes two major classes of PFAS compounds to fall apart, leaving behind only benign end products. - Phys.org

Corporate consolidation—in which mergers and acquisitions of smaller companies lead to fewer, larger companies—has been a trend for decades in areas ranging from retail to technology. This consolidation gives some corporations outsize power, a consequence President Biden addressed in his 2021 executive order seeking to curb the “excessive concentration of industry”  The food and agriculture sector is no exception to this troubling trend, and the consequences can be far-reaching. For example, recent research has shown that the nation's largest meat and poultry producer, Tyson Foods (Statista 2022), has monopoly-like power that threatens the health, safety, and well-being of chicken farmers, workers, and communities in numerous ways (Boehm 2021a). Another recent study showed how corporate consolidation in the US food system has increased food prices and decreased food access . - UCS

Agriculture already uses almost half of the world’s vegetated land. It consumes 90 percent of all the water used by humanity and generates one-quarter of the annual global emissions that are causing global warming. And yet of the seven billion people living today, 820 million are undernourished because they don’t have access to—or can’t afford—an adequate diet.  “We have to produce 30 percent more food on the same land area, stop deforestation, [and] cut carbon emissions for food production by two-thirds,” says Waite in an interview.  All of that must be done while reducing poverty levels and the loss of natural habitat, preventing freshwater depletion, and cutting pollution as well as other environmental impacts of farming.​- National Geographic

Nobody knows how many wells have dried up in Sunizona, let alone the entire Willcox Basin, which covers 1,911 square miles in Arizona’s southeast corner, near the New Mexico border. But between 2014 and 2019, records from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) show that around 20 wells in the Sunizona area were deepened after drying up. In the entire basin during that time, records show that 57 wells were deepened, but interviews and anecdotal accounts place the number at more than 100.- High Country News

Right: Thousands of dairy cows crowd the Coronado Dairy’s feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area near Sunizona, Arizona. - Roberto (Bear) Guerra / High Country News