Ag News: USDA Feeds School Children and California Farm Losses

**Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue announced a range of nationwide flexibilities to ensure America’s children receive the nutritious food they need throughout the upcoming school year.

These waivers give states, schools, and childcare providers time to plan for how they will serve children in the fall, including allowing for new and innovative feeding options as the nation recovers from the coronavirus.

This announcement empowers them to operate the School

Breakfast Program and National School Lunch Program to best serve their students throughout the 2020-2021 school year.

**The National Pork Producers Council strongly supports legislation being discussed by the Senate Ag Committee that creates important elements needed to support a private carbon credit offset market.

The Growing Climate Solutions Act, direct the USDA, would create a program to provide transparency, legitimacy and informal endorsement of third-party verifiers and technical service providers that help private landowners generate carbon credits through a variety of ag and forestry related

practices.

**The pandemic has already caused $2 billion in losses for California farms, ranches and agricultural businesses, and a study released last week says the impact could go much higher.

The study, commissioned by the California Farm Bureau and other organizations, says losses could reach $5.9 billion to $8.6 billion by year's end.

The impacts come both from lost sales and from rising costs of food production and processing.