More than 250 Sorrento Lactalis production and maintenance employees are back on the job after a two-day strike that started July 9 outside the Buffalo, New York, cheese plant. The employees that went on strike are members of the Teamsters Local Union No. 264, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, from Cheektowaga, New York. The issue was inferior terms for health care coverage.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court dealt a blow to environmentalists concerned about water pollution from livestock farms when it said communities couldn't set stricter standards than the state. According to the Associated Press, the ruling was the first decision by a state Supreme Court from among several similar cases filed in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma.

Some USDA reports vital to dairy producers could be on the budgetary chopping block. A recent Farm Foundation webinar featured several speakers from the federal government, private industry and commodity groups discussing how to head off cuts to many market reports.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) plans to launch a new approach to its testing for harmful levels of chemical residues in meat, poultry, and egg products. Through its National Residue Program (NRP), FSIS tests for the presence of chemical compounds, including approved (legal) and unapproved (illegal) veterinary drugs, pesticides, hormones, and environmental contaminants that may appear in meat, poultry, and egg products. The new, modern, high-efficiency methods that FSIS has announced will conserve resources and provide useful and reliable results while enabling the Agency to analyze each sample for more chemical compounds than previously possible.

An ambitious effort to sequence the genomes of 100,000 infectious microorganisms and speed diagnosis of foodborne illnesses has been launched by the University of California – Davis, Agilent Technologies and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Professor Bart Weimer of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine serves as director of the 100K Genome Project and co-director of the recently established BGI@UC Davis facility, where the sequencing will be done. Other collaborators include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the USDA. The new five-year microbial pathogen project focuses on making the food supply safer for consumers.

The nation’s first E15 (15 percent ethanol/85 percent gasoline) gallons are being sold at a Zarco 66 “Oasis” station in Lawrence, Kansas, and plans to offer E15 at the nation’s second retail station, a Zarco 66 in Ottawa, Kansas, are nearly complete. On June 8, the EPA gave final approval for the sale and use of E15 ethanol blends in light duty vehicles made since 2001. This represents nearly two-thirds of all vehicles on the road and nearly three-fourths of all miles driven. Given present market conditions, E15 will sell for less than E10 and gasoline not containing ethanol.