Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has a line about the state of small-scale agriculture in America these days.

It’s drawn from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, which shows that as the average size of farms has risen, the nation had lost 544,000 of them since 1981.

“That’s every farm today that exists in North Dakota and South Dakota, added to those in Wisconsin and Minnesota, added to those in Nebraska and Colorado, added to those in Oklahoma and Missouri,” Mr. Vilsack told a conference in Washington this spring. “Are we as a country OK with it?”

It was a few months ago when Gov. Ron DeSantis first announced his support for preventing “cultivated” lab-grown meat from being made or sold in Florida. “You need meat, OK. And we’re going to have meat in Florida,” the Republican governor said, adding, “We’re not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill banning lab-grown meat in his state Wednesday, in what he described as an effort to “save our beef.”

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a press release Wednesday. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

Florida banned lab-grown meat this week in a decision that was derided by many commentators as a silly encroachment on the free market, but the Sunshine State’s policy is actually protecting an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people from destruction.

While not yet a widely available commercial product, lab-grown meat, which is grown from existing animal cells, is widely seen as the future of food production. Advocates of the product say it is no different from farm-grown meat and is necessary to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

Dave Duttlinger's first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen.

About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest.

A new exemption for drone piloting from the Federal Aviation Administration has cleared the airways for "drone-swarm" agriculture, a method of seeding and spraying crops at a fraction of the traditional cost.

Hylio, a Texas-based drone manufacturer, successfully applied for an exemption from the FAA to allow fleets of drones weighing 55 pounds or more to fly together. 

It's the first exception of its kind for machines that carry what the company calls a "meaningful payload" and makes the process competitive with traditional tractors and seeding rigs.

At dawn on Friday, Baljeet Kaur, a farmer from Punjab, led a group of 200 women to the village of Shambhu in the state with one mission in mind: to join the ongoing farmers’ protest in India on International Women’s Day.

The 38-year-old mother of two from Chamuru village said that it was important to raise awareness of the struggles faced by women farmers in India on this day.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal promised more aid for French agriculture on Tuesday and vowed to shield it from “unfair competition” in an attempt to appease protesting farmers, but many appeared unmoved by his efforts as they blocked major roads around Paris for a second day.

The barricades of tractors and bales of hay caused miles of traffic bottlenecks in the Paris region, but protesters have not encircled the city. Neither have they crippled the French capital itself, which has experienced only limited disruptions so far.

Dozens of farmers who descended on a food market outside Paris have been arrested, as tensions over protests for better conditions escalated.

The French government had warned that disruption at Rungis, a food distribution hub which feeds 12 million people, would cross a red line.

About 91 farmers who converged on the market are in custody, police said.

Farmers are aiming to stop food deliveries reaching supermarkets, in a call for better pay and less red tape.

French farmers used tractors, tires, and manure to block off eight major roads to Paris and showcase their displeasure with planned European Union regulations on the farming sector, which they argue could cripple their industry and push business into other, less-efficient parts of the world.