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Open-outcry grain trading at the 156-year-old Kansas City Board of Trade will go quiet in June as new owner CME Group moves the once-raucous pits to Chicago. CME, owner of the Chicago Board of Trade, bought the Kansas City wheat exchange last year, cementing its dominance in global grain trading after a challenge from rival IntercontinentalExchange.

The unrelenting drought gripping key farming states in the U.S. Plains shows no signs of abating, and it will take a deluge of snow or rain to restore critical moisture to farmland before spring planting of new crops, a climate expert said on Thursday. "It's not a pretty picture," said climatologist Mark Svoboda of the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center.

Crop-killing drought deepened in Kansas over the last week, further jeopardizing this season's production of winter wheat, a key U.S. crop. Kansas is generally the top U.S. wheat-growing state, but the new crop planted last fall has been struggling with a lack of soil moisture. Without rain and/or heavy snow before spring, millions of acres of wheat could be ruined.

A controversial new biotech corn developed by Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical,, will be delayed at least another year as the company awaits regulatory approval amid opposition from farmers, consumers and public health officials. Dow AgroSciences officials said Friday that they now expect the first sales of Enlist for planting in 2014. Previously officials had set the 2013 planting season as a target, but U.S. farmers are already buying seed for planting this spring, and Dow has yet to secure U.S. approval for Enlist.

The U.S. drought that crippled many communities across the nation last year shows little sign of retreating, and the threat of persistent water scarcity is spurring efforts to preserve every drop. As the drought of 2012 creeps into 2013, experts say the slow-spreading catastrophe presents near-term problems for a key U.S. agricultural region and potential long-term challenges for millions of Americans.

Monsanto Co, the world's largest seed company, said on Tuesday that expansion efforts in Latin America are paying off, adding to the company's strength in the U.S. market and helping it capture surprisingly strong profits. Monsanto has been pushing for deeper penetration of its corn seed products in Latin America and said it was seeing good progress on upgrading offerings in Brazil and Argentina. In particular, sales of corn engineered both to tolerate weed-killing treatments and to protect the plant from pests are expanding rapidly in both countries, the company said.

U.S. regulators proposed new food safety rules on Friday that aim to make food processors and farms more accountable for reducing food borne illnesses that kill or sicken thousands of Americans annually. The rules, required by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that was signed into law two years ago, were announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday.

A controversial genetically engineered salmon has moved a step closer to the consumer's dining table after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday the fish didn't appear likely to pose a threat to the environment or to humans who eat it. AquAdvantage salmon eggs would produce fish with the potential to grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon. If it gets a final go-ahead, it would be the first food from a transgenic animal - one whose genome has been altered - to be approved by the FDA.

Food safety and animal welfare groups petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday seeking limits on an animal feed additive that is the subject of concerns about human and animal health. Russia said earlier this month that it was requiring meat it imports to be tested and certified free of the feed additive ractopamine, a move jeopardizing the more than $500 million a year in exports of U.S. beef and pork to that country.

A low-water crisis now plaguing part of the Mississippi River system will boost industry arguments for long-delayed government improvement projects along U.S. rivers, though looming federal budget battles remain a high hurdle. Experts say even as billions of dollars of river-borne commerce slow along the shallow section of the Mississippi, an even larger economic catastrophe is looming as dozens of critical infrastructure improvements and repairs up and down the entire U.S. river system remain long overdue.