Food, in brief

Drought on this year's crops

France is heading for its smallest corn harvest since 1976, after five heatwaves and a drought that began in May. [6] Chad banned exports of six crops on Wednesday because dry spells wrecked its harvests. [3] A long dry spell caused widespread crop failure across Kenya's main grain-growing region. [5]

Companies paying to end lawsuits

Bayer is asking a Missouri judge to approve $7.25 billion to close about 65,000 Roundup cancer claims. [1] Chemours, DuPont and Corteva agreed to pay North Carolina $455 million over long-lasting industrial chemicals found in its water. [7]

Food stopped at borders

The United States will stop importing certain Canadian dairy products from 29 September. [5] Chad banned exports of millet, corn, rice, sorghum, wheat and cotton seed. [3] Texas banned moving any warm-blooded animal out of two counties after one horse was found with a flesh-eating parasite. [4]

The cost of shipping food

The heavy fuel oil that powers cargo ships costs more than 70% more than it did before the Iran war began. [11] Middle East exports of that fuel fell 45% between March and August, against the same months last year. [11] Europe's corn imports were raised to 23.2 million tonnes this week, so more grain must cross an ocean to reach it. [6]

2 pressures seen across the day run through Food too.

• Oil routes closing one by oneHigh ↑ · seen in 4 beats→
• Taking it to a courtBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1Bayer wants one court to close 65,000 Roundup cancer claims, and the ones nobody has filed yet
2. 2Largest lettuce outbreak declared over
3. 3Chad bans exports of six crops
4. 4First US horse found with screwworm
5. 5France's corn crop smallest since 1976

Bayer, the German chemicals and medicines company that bought Monsanto in 2018, goes before a Missouri state judge on Monday. [1]

Judge Boyer is not expected to rule on Monday, and the thing to watch is whether he accepts that a settlement can bind people who have not yet sued. [1]

Also seen in Space, Sports and Gaming.

US health authorities declared the country's largest recorded cyclosporiasis outbreak over on Friday. [2]

Cyclospora is a parasite that gets into food and causes long bouts of illness, and this one arrived on iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico for Taylor Farms, one of North America's biggest salad suppliers. [2]

The final count is 12,883 people ill across 21 states, 570 of them in hospital, and two dead. [2]

Taylor Farms recalled the lettuce on 17 July; at the peak, before the recall, more than 1,000 infections were reported in a single day. [2]

The outbreak is closed but the cause is not.

The Food and Drug Administration has finished inspecting the Mexican farms and the processing plant and is still waiting on the sample results. [2]

Chad's commerce minister, Mathieu Guibolo Fanga, signed a decree on Wednesday banning exports of millet, corn, rice, sorghum, wheat and cotton seed. [3]

A second decree lifted import duties on those grains, on animal feed and on farm equipment. [3]

Chad is a landlocked country in central Africa, and repeated dry spells from July to mid-August damaged harvests across it. [3]

The World Food Programme said more than 3 million people there would go short of food between June and August. [3]

The agriculture minister, Keda Ballah, said planting off-season crops on irrigated land is the only way to prevent famine in some regions.

Herders in the west are already crossing into the Central African Republic to keep their animals alive. [3]

Bayer already paid about $10 billion in 2020, and that deal only covered people who had already sued, so the claims kept coming.

the same step, one settlement later: a national water settlement approved in 2024 was meant to close it, and the governments that deal left out are being paid separately now

a cost the state can name, a movement ban on two counties, taken instead of an outbreak it cannot size, put at up to $1.8 billion

Chad's government stopped six crops leaving the country before anyone had counted the harvest, taking a loss it can measure over a famine it cannot

All three are sensible, and the judge has to weigh them for people who have not fallen ill yet.

A working ranch horse in Presidio County, in southern Texas near the Mexican border, was confirmed on Wednesday with New World screwworm. [4] It is the first US horse case.

Screwworm is a fly whose maggots burrow into the living flesh of warm-blooded animals, and the United States wiped it out in the 1960s. [4]

Texas responded by banning the movement of warm-blooded animals out of Presidio and Jeff Davis counties. [4] Experts put the cost of a widespread outbreak at up to $1.8 billion. [4]

Every rancher in those two counties now carries a movement ban because of one horse, and nobody has said where that horse picked up the parasite. [4]

The US Department of Agriculture's staff in Europe cut their estimate of this year's European Union corn harvest to 48.2 million tonnes. [6]

France, the bloc's biggest grower, is heading for its smallest corn crop since the drought year of 1976. [6]

Five heatwaves and a drought that started in May scorched the fields, and even irrigated ground suffered because local authorities restricted watering to protect drinking supplies. [6]

French yields are now forecast 30% below the five-year average. [6]

French dairy farmers, short of hay after the same drought, have started cutting corn grown for grain and feeding it to cattle, which takes that grain out of the harvest and out of their income. [6]

The US Department of Agriculture cut its forecast for this year's American corn crop by 213 million bushels, in the monthly world supply and demand report published on 11 September. [5]

The crop is now put at 15.8 billion bushels, with the average yield down 2.2 bushels to 178.5 bushels an acre. [5]

The price American growers are expected to get was raised 30 cents to $4.80 a bushel. [5]

Exports were left unchanged at 3.3 billion bushels, so the whole of the cut comes out of stocks and animal feed. [5]

Feed and residual use was cut 150 million bushels to 6.0 billion in the same report. [5]

The animals that eat American corn are absorbing the whole of the reduction, because the export forecast did not move.

India's rice production will be lower this year than last, the first year-on-year fall in ten years, the US Department of Agriculture said. [5]

The cause is a below-normal monsoon whose rain also fell unevenly across the country. [5]

India is the world's largest rice exporter, so what it harvests sets much of the price that poorer importing countries pay. [5]

World rice supplies were still raised 1.2 million tonnes to 736.6 million, because India began the year holding far more grain than expected. [5]

World rice trade was trimmed to 62.6 million tonnes. [5]

India stored a lot of grain in better years. That stock is covering this year's smaller harvest, so importing countries have not yet had to pay more. [5]

A prolonged dry spell caused widespread crop failure across Kenya's main grain-growing region, the US Department of Agriculture said, cutting the country's corn harvest. [5]

Corn is the staple food there, eaten daily as a maize-meal porridge. India and Russia also grew less corn than expected. [5]

World production of coarse grains, meaning the feed grains led by corn and barley, was cut 5.1 million tonnes to 1.588 billion. [5]

Australia offset part of that with a record barley crop of 17.1 million tonnes, raised three million in a single month on good rain. [5]

The same report cut world coarse-grain production by 5.1 million tonnes, and Europe's corn imports were raised to 23.2 million. [5][6]

Buyers short of grain are bidding for the same shrinking crop.

Australia set a record barley crop and Canada's wheat forecast rose to 36 million tonnes. [5][6]

Chemours, DuPont and Corteva agreed to pay North Carolina $455 million to settle claims over PFAS, a family of industrial chemicals that barely break down in water or soil. [7]

Corteva is one of the world's biggest seed and farm-chemical companies. [7]

The money is paid over 15 years, with Chemours carrying half; it expects to pay about $50 million in the next 12 months. [7]

The deal covers governments left out of a national water settlement approved in 2024. [7]

The 2024 settlement was meant to have dealt with American drinking-water claims. This is a second bill, from the governments that deal did not reach. [7]

Jim Pillen, the governor of Nebraska, built one of the largest pork businesses in the United States before taking office three years ago. [8]

The New York Times and the Flatwater Free Press found that Pillen Family Farms has taken on undocumented workers as it grew to about 1,200 employees across four states and Canada. [8]

Pillen has backed the Trump administration's immigration crackdown and directed the Nebraska State Patrol to work with immigration officers. [8] He is seeking re-election this autumn. [8]

Many farms in Nebraska and other states rely on migrant workers because they cannot hire enough people locally, so the crackdown and the hog barns are pulling in opposite directions. [8]

Machines that tell whether an egg holds a male or a female chick before it hatches now cover 40% of the European Union's laying flock, up from nothing five years ago. [9]

Hatcheries without them incubate eggs for 21 days, employ trained sexers, and then kill half the chicks, because males of laying breeds cannot lay eggs. [9]

Germany and France have banned that killing and Italy plans to end it by 2027. [9] Switzerland requires nothing and is already past 85%. [9]

In the United States, producers managing just over 4% of the laying flock are switching to it as their flocks retire. [9]

United Egg Producers, which accounts for 90% of American egg production, says it is committed to the technology once it is economically and operationally feasible. [9]

The United States will stop importing certain Canadian dairy products from 29 September, under an exclusion announced on 8 September. [5]

Duties on some Canadian dairy, announced in July, had already taken effect on 21 August. [5]

The US Department of Agriculture's September forecasts assume both stay in place, and it raised the price it expects American farmers to get for milk to $19.90 per hundredweight. [5]

Canada's own counter-tariffs of up to 50%, on $27.6 billion of American goods, started on 8 September and hit US dairy, sweeteners and farm equipment. [10]

Milk is now taxed or blocked in both directions across the same border. [5][10] Dairy farmers on each side have lost their nearest foreign customer.

The heavy fuel oil that powers cargo ships costs more than 70% more than it did before the Iran war, and supply is expected to be very tight this quarter. [11]

Refineries damaged by strikes in Russia and the Middle East are putting the crude they can still process into diesel instead. [11]

Middle East exports of ship fuel fell 45% between March and August, against the same months a year earlier. [11]

Brent crude, the main world oil price, went back above $100 a barrel on 9 September. [12]

Grain crosses oceans in bulk carriers that burn exactly this fuel. A tight quarter for it arrives in importing countries as a higher landed price for wheat, corn and rice.

Also seen in World, Finance and Climate.

Wholesale eggs in the United States averaged 67.0 cents a dozen in the second quarter of 2026. [5]

The average for the whole of 2025, when bird flu was killing laying hens in large numbers, was 373.7 cents. [5]

The US Department of Agriculture raised its egg production forecast again this month, because the laying flock is growing. [5]

It also cut its egg price forecast for the rest of 2026 and left 2027 unchanged. [5]

The flock that bird flu cut down has been rebuilt, and that is what brought the shelf price down. [5]

The US Department of Agriculture cut its forecast for Louisiana's cane sugar production by 13,852 short tons this month. [5]

The cause is a mealy bug, a small sap-sucking insect that weakens the cane. [5]

The industry told the department it cannot say how much the pest will take until the harvest is well under way. [5]

Louisiana and Florida between them grow almost all the cane sugar made in the United States, and American sugar supply for next year was cut by 168,282 tons in all. [5]

Louisiana's growers will not know the size of the loss until they are cutting the cane, and the national supply figure is being forecast without it. [5]

The US Department of Agriculture cut its forecast for the American cotton crop by 3%, to 13.2 million bales, with the national yield down to 776 pounds an acre. [5]

Yields fell in the Delta and the Southwest and rose slightly in the Southeast and West. [5]

The amount of cotton American mills will use was cut to 1.50 million bales, because the country's textile industry keeps contracting. [5]

The price growers are expected to get rose to 78 cents a pound from 75 cents. [5]

Cotton is a farm crop before it is a fabric, and it competes for the same land, water and machinery as the corn and soybeans grown beside it.

Chad's export ban this week covered cotton seed too. [3]

The FAO, the UN's food agency, has taken over the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators, the only set of internationally comparable figures on what countries spend on farm research and how many researchers they employ. [13]

The programme was run for more than two decades by the International Food Policy Research Institute. [13] It is now published on FAOSTAT, the FAO's own statistics service, country by country. [13]

Maximo Torero, the FAO's chief economist, said the figures show where research gaps remain and where money needs to go. [13]

In many countries the data on farm research spending is scattered and incomplete, which makes it impossible to say whether a national research system is growing or shrinking. [13]

A field trial in semi-arid India compared conventional farming, natural farming and five rates of compost on a pigeonpea and wheat rotation. [14]

Pigeonpea is a drought-tolerant pulse and a staple source of protein across South Asia.

Compost at 12 tonnes a hectare grew the biggest root systems: root length density was 23.3% above natural farming and 8.0% above conventional at flowering. [14]

Root growth and nutrient uptake peaked 90 days after sowing and fell away while the pods filled. [14]

More compost was not better. At 24 tonnes a hectare, the heaviest rate, the plants took up less phosphorus and potassium than they did at 12. [14]

David Montgomery, a geologist who has written three books about soil, argued in Civil Eats that American farm policy should reward farming practices rather than a word on a certificate. [15]

He defines regenerative farming as three things done together: not disturbing the soil, keeping it covered with cover crops, and rotating a variety of crops. [15]

He separates it from organic farming, which often ploughs, and from no-till farming, which leans on weedkiller. [15]

It is an opinion piece and not a finding, and it lands while that department is deciding what its new regenerative programme will actually pay for. [15]