2 Comments 
One of my favorite camping activities is reading a good book while listening to the sounds of nature.
I’m an avid camper. There’s nothing better than spending a week in the woods enjoying the calm and quiet beauty of nature. Food tastes best to me when it’s cooked over a campfire. And I want to make sure that I’ll always be able to go camping when I want to relax. Read more »
USDA Forest Service research is transforming exhausted farmland in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee into thousands of acres of hardwood forests that will provide revenue to landowners, remove carbon from the air and serve as habitats for wildlife.
In 1998, scientists with the Forest Service’s Center for Bottomland Hardwoods Research, in Stoneville, Miss., began testing methods of afforestation – growing trees on barren farmland. The result was a tree-planting technique that mixed cottonwoods trees (poplars) with hardwood yearlings to produce strong, straight-stemmed hardwood trees.
Ever wonder exactly how many Americans struggle to put food on table? It’s a question pondered more and more during a tough economy. Today, the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) has shed some light on these conditions with their annual analysis of Americans’ success in feeding themselves and their families.
The report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2010, provides an important analysis of how well people are faring on this front during difficult economic times.
In 2010, just over 85 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year. However, about 17.2 million households were unable, at some point in the year, to provide either enough food or adequate food for at least one member due to a lack of resources. That equates to nearly 49 million people in the United States – roughly one in six – who lived in a food insecure household in 2010. Read more »
A screenshot of the Cattle Dashboard. The livestock dashboards allow you to see weekly volume and price information presented in graphs and tables that can be customized for viewing and downloaded for use in reports and presentations.
USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service is expanding upon its traditional Market News reports to create interactive dashboards. The dashboards, first launched in the summer of 2010, provide quick, easy access to volume and price information for cattle, hogs, and sheep. Read more »
Prairie Grove dam helps reduce flooding of Muddy Fork Creek along the western edge of Prairie Grove.
The flooding from this year’s spring rain storms caused millions of dollars worth of damage to homes, businesses and crops in Arkansas.
But some flooding was reduced or minimized, thanks to 207 small and medium-sized dams built by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), in partnership with local watershed districts. Read more »
