Amazon Prime head departs company after 18 years

The Amazon executive who was taking on additional responsibilities following the company’s acquisition of Whole Foods has resigned. Greg Greeley, who was with Amazon for 18 years, announced his decision on LinkedIn. Read more at CBS News … 

General Mills, Annie's Mac & Cheese tap South Dakota farm

General Mills is creating South Dakota’s largest organic farm to ensure it has the wheat needed for Annie’s Macaroni & Cheese, the company announced Tuesday. The Minnesota-based food giant has signed an agreement with Gunsmoke Farms to convert 34,000 acres to organic by 2020. Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle …

Hemp is on the horizon. Will it change the game for farm country?

Since the 2014 Farm Bill legalized the growing of hemp in certain circumstances, American farmers have been working to re-create an industry that their grandfathers, but not their fathers, were a part of. If hemp were fulling legalized, how would rural areas of the U.S. benefit? Read more at Civil Eats …

GAO says FDA needs to work on ‘prioritizing and sequencing’

The Food and Drug Administration has been busy making recommendations and guidance documents since the Food Safety Modernization Act passed in January 2011. But the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a study released Monday, has made three recommendations regarding the agency’s food-safety efforts. Read more at Food Safety News …

Mysteries of the Moo-crobiome: Could tweaking cow gut bugs improve beef?

What does the microbiome of a cow’s four stomachs look like? A team of animal scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland recently mapped those genomes to figure out which helped with digestion and which made methane. The researchers even found some new digestive enzymes—something that could lead to a type of personalized medicine for bovines. Read more at NPR …