USDA Blog

For the past year, Thaddeus White provided education and training to the Iraqi people as an advisor for the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) in Baghdad.

For as long as Dr. Katherine Ralston could remember, she wanted to be a veterinarian. "My 6th grade teacher wrote on my report card (that I still have!), 'When you become a vet, I'll bring Clint (his black Labrador) to see you.' As I got older, I discovered more and more reasons why I wanted to...

Recovery Act funding spurs a renaissance in backcountry trail maintenance. This year, visitors to the Los Padres National Forest, near Goleta, Calif., are seeing widespread wilderness trail improvements thanks to Recovery Act funds. Nearly $2.3 million was allocated to the forest for wilderness...

Dozens of people gathered in Monticello, Ky., on Wednesday to break ground on a project in which five local families began the process of building their own homes. Great partnerships can lead to great projects – and this event highlighted several strategic partners that worked incredibly hard to...

USDA’s Smuggling Interdiction and Trade Compliance (SITC), a program with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), is in its tenth year of protecting American agriculture from invasive pests and diseases. Some of SITC’s efforts toward this goal include identifying and closing...

With just over two weeks left in the 2011 Feds Feed Families campaign, Forest Service employees are joining forces all over the country in an extraordinary show of commitment and compassion as its summer food drive moves to full gear in helping reach the USDA’s goal of 500,000 pounds of donated food...

Cross posted from the White House blog: Today, I am hosting a forum focused on the rural economy at the Iowa state fair. But, Rural America has been in the spotlight all this week as I joined President Obama to travel across parts of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, visiting rural communities to...

Despite having some of the highest unemployment and home foreclosure rates in New Jersey, the city of Perth Amboy refuses to let kids go hungry over the summer. In 2011 the city extended the Summer Food Service Program by two weeks and added 20 new feeding sites. Through an aggressive marketing...

Farm Service Agency (FSA) Administrator Bruce Nelson traveled to South Texas last week in the midst of the historic drought impacting most of Texas and the Southwest and adversely affecting thousands of agricultural producers. Nelson took the opportunity to visit with area farmers, ranchers and...

Members of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) attended a weeklong meeting hosted by U.S. officials in Monterey, Calif. The UPOV’s Technical Working Party for Vegetables, made up of delegates from 13 countries, was also able to observe a lettuce field-trial...