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Monsanto Co, the world's largest seed company, reported higher-than-expected quarterly earnings on Wednesday as its corn and soybean businesses expanded globally. The company, which specializes in developing genetically engineered crops that withstand herbicides and ward off insects, said the profit margin in corn, its top revenue producer, increased 2.5 points in the second quarter ended on February 28. The corn business was on track to post record volume for the fiscal year, despite lower plantings expected in the United States this spring.

A public interest group is asking a court to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture to turn over documents explaining its approval of a genetically altered alfalfa even as the department acknowledged the crop's potential to do environmental damage. The Center for Food Safety said on Thursday that it believes the USDA may have succumbed to outside pressure, possibly from Monsanto Co., the developer of the genetic trait in the biotech alfalfa.

Dan Kittle has spent more than a decade waiting for this day. As the man in charge of research and development at Dow AgroSciences, the unit of Dow Chemical Co that develops agricultural seeds and pesticides, Kittle remembers the "big shock" when rival Monsanto Co unveiled a genetically modified seed in 1996 designed to be used in combination with a specific herbicide, a combination that rapidly led Monsanto to riches. Since then, Monsanto has become the world's largest seed company with $15 billion in annual sales, up roughly 200 percent from a decade ago, and Kittle and a team of Dow researchers have been working to catch up.

Three environmental and public health groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, seeking to press it to move forward with rules that would require public disclosure of certain pesticide ingredients. The Center for Environmental Health, Beyond Pesticides, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, all non-profit advocacy groups, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The groups claimed there has been an "unreasonable delay" on the EPA's part in finalizing rules to require chemical manufacturers to disclose hazardous inert ingredients in their pesticide products.

Growing crops free from contamination by genetically modified crops and the pesticides used on those biotech versions is getting more difficult and more costly for U.S. farmers, and new government rules to control contamination are needed, according to report issued on Monday by an environmental organization and an organic food group. Based on information from 268 farmers from 17 U.S. states, the report said more than 30 percent of farmers seeking to grow organic crops reported that unintended GMO presence has been found or suspected on their farms, according to the report by Food & Water Watch and the Organic Farmers' Agency for Relationship Marketing (OFARM).

DuPont Pioneer, the agricultural seed unit of DuPont, said on Thursday it was launching a suite of "whole-farm decision" services aimed at boosting crop productivity, a line of business many in the agricultural sector are racing to offer. The platform of data and technology services, to be called "Encirca," will have a dedicated website and a team of about 50 Encirca sales and service agents through key corn- and soybean-growing areas of the U.S. Midwest, DuPont said.

Nearly 500 foods found on grocery store shelves in the United States, including many foods labeled as "healthy," contain a potentially hazardous industrial plastics chemical, according to a report issued Thursday by a health research and advocacy group. Azodicarbonamide, also known as ADA, was found as an ingredient in breads, bagels, tortillas, hamburger and hot dog buns, pizza, pastries, and other food products, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington.

A citizens' group on Maui on Monday launched a petition to allow voters to consider temporarily suspending production of genetically modified crops (GMOs) on the Hawaiian island. The group said its "temporary moratorium initiative" seeks a suspension until the completion of an environmental and public health impact study examining the effects of widespread testing of GMO crops and associated pesticide use.

After more than 15 years of using genetically modified crops, U.S. farmers are continuing to see an array of benefits, but the impacts on the environmental and on food production are mixed, and high farmer use of a popular herbicide on GMO crops is a cause for ongoing concern, according to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We are not characterizing them (GMO crops) as bad or good. We are just providing information," said Michael Livingston, a government agricultural economist and one of the authors of the report, prepared by the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS).

Farm workers, children and other people working or living near farm fields would have more protection from hazardous pesticides under changes proposed on Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Today marks an important milestone for the farm workers who plant, tend, and harvest the food that we put on our tables each day," Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator, said in a statement. EPA is proposing revisions to the agency's 22-year-old "Worker Protection Standard" that EPA officials say will help protect approximately 2 million U.S. farm workers and their families from exposure to pesticides used to protect crops from weeds, insects, and disease.