USDA Blog

Ant keepers enjoy a fun and educational hobby, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has an interest in it. You might wonder what ant keeping has to do with American agriculture and natural resources. Some invertebrates that people—including ant keepers—import into the U.S. or...

Dr. Engil Pereira, Associate Professor of the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), was selected as a fellow in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) 2022 E. Kika de la Garza fellowship program. Dr. Pereira initially learned...

Happy Compromise Farm + Sanctuary grows nutritious food for their local community distributed through a “free farm stand.” Though surrounded by farms in the rural Southern Tier of New York, the area is a food desert with a 16% poverty rate, a condition that often leads to higher risk for chronic...

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service hosted a delegation of government and private sector representatives from Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay who traveled to the Washington, D.C., area to learn about sustainable, climate-smart agricultural practices being...

The 2023 SNAP E&T State Institute, hosted by the Food and Nutrition Service, brought together 20 state SNAP agencies for a two-day event that aimed to assess and enhance their SNAP Employment and Training (E&T) programs. The theme of the event, "Mind the Gap: Building a Bridge from Vision to...

For a women-owned business in rural Indiana, working with USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) became a life-changing experience. Soccer moms Carol Podolak and Joy Thompkins sold homemade peanut butter as their kids’ team fundraiser to travel from Portage, Indiana to Dallas, Texas for a...

National Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15 to October 15, is a time to celebrate the rich history, traditions and cultural diversity of the Hispanic and Latino/a community. As this recognition month comes to a close, USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics (REE) mission area is spotlighting...

Georgia native Topeka Ham found a new calling serving the American public through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) after 26 years in the South Carolina Air National Guard.

In Hawaii, the word ‘āina describes interconnected relationships between people, the environment and spiritual kin.

Boston’s urban agriculture community is a diverse group of farmers and community advocates, and their needs are as varied as the types of operations they run and the populations they serve. In 2021, the City of Boston’s GrowBoston initiative received a $200,000 Urban Agriculture and Innovative...