USDA Blog

As a parent, Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day is a chance to physically demonstrate what we as parents do while our children are in school. It’s an opportunity to show them that they can aspire to be anything they dream to be. When my daughter told me she had to share with her class what her...

The word “agriculture” does not usually come to mind when one thinks of forests, but perhaps it’s time that it should. “The forest products industry employs nearly 1 million people and contributes $254 billion to America’s economy through sales and payroll,” said Eric Norland, a national program...

The United States forest products industry accounts for approximately four percent of the nation’s total manufacturing GDP, producing over $200 billion in products every year. To keep tabs on the condition and status of America’s forest resources over time, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory...

Technology always changes the way we think and how we do things. Now, thanks to research at Michigan State University (MSU), farmers have a new tool to determine precisely where to focus their efforts… or not. The result can save them money and save the environment from excess – wasted – fertilizer.

At USDA, we celebrate Earth Day 2019 by offering big thank-yous to farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners for all they do. Every day, we recognize their efforts to conserve natural resources while producing food, fiber, and fuel for people in their communities and around the world. They’re doing...

Illinois producers grow a LOT of corn and soybeans. The Prairie State ranked first in soybean production and second in corn production in 2017. But there is a great deal more agricultural production coming from the 72,000 farms located in our 102 counties. Illinois ranks first in horseradish acres...

“Resilience” is the ability to recover from change, or when you think about landscapes, the ability to recover from disturbances like wildfires. A new model takes the idea of resilience and applies it to the natural environment, specifically, to sagebrush. This resilience model is one of the core...

USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) estimates that about 30 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten at the retail and consumer level.

Why are Rocky Mountain Research Station scientists sampling tree rings in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeast Arizona? Because tree ring samples reveal the history of fire. When fire scorches a tree, the tree floods its wound with sap, which protects the wound from wood rot decay for hundreds of...

(Editor’s note: Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue on April 1 proclaimed “ Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month.” The following illustrates some of the research that USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture supports to control invasive pests in agriculture.)