Livestock

After days of parading around her beefy black steer in the dung-scented August heat at the Colorado State Fair, Brandi Calderwood made the final competition. For months, the 16-year-old worked from dawn well past dusk, fitting in the work around school, to feed, train and clean her steer. But just before the last round, when the animals are sold, fair officials disqualified her.

When Cyagra Inc. holds an office potluck, no one's stomach churns when the lasagna, meatloaf or tacos are made with cloned beef. The cutting-edge ingredient was produced on the company's Pennsylvania farm for the Food and Drug Administration, which spent seven years evaluating the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring. "We had leftovers," so we used them, said Steve Mower, director of marketing for the Elizabethtown, Pa.-based company.

The bloodthirsty enemy had gathered on the city's perimeter, but this time the locals were ready. They had formed armed committees similar to the "Sons of Iraq" forces fighting off Al Qaeda in Iraq militants in western Iraq. They were gearing up for a fight. Their foes had been attacking them with increasing abandon on the outskirts of this river city 145 miles southeast of Baghdad. They struck along the harsh desert plain leading to Saudi Arabia. They came day or night.

Fred Garza has been patrolling a piece of the Rio Grande for 16 years, usually riding solo on horseback, sometimes venturing to areas where his radio and cellphone have limited range. But Garza isn't looking for drug smugglers, human traffickers or illegal immigrants. He's looking for stray livestock that might be carrying a tick with a deadly disease into the United States. "If it doesn't have hooves, it's not our concern," Garza said. Garza is a veteran of the 61-member U.S.

For farmers, this stinks: Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if the federal government decides to charge fees for air-polluting animals. Farmers are turning their noses up at the notion, which they contend is a possible consequence of an Environmental Protection Agency report after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases from motor vehicles amount to air pollution.

A hardy, pedestrian plant is doing triple duty in California's agricultural heartland. Farmers, water managers and agriculture researchers are watching an experiment using canola plants to absorb the salt from soil and water. The seeds are then crushed to extract oil for blending into environmentally friendly biodiesel. If that were the end of the story, it would be just another case of farmers turning food into fuel.

As a little boy growing up in then-rural South El Monte, Richard Kruse could do a 360-degree spin outside his family's feed mill and see nothing but open land and hog farms. That was in 1950. In 2008, the 1.5-acre plot that Kruse's father and uncle took over in 1935 is within eyesight of warehouses, tract homes and a Carl's Jr. And today, Kruse Feed & Supply, the 30-year-old retail store that sprang from the family feed mill business, will close its doors on Santa Anita Avenue.

Britain raced Saturday to avert economic disaster by halting meat and dairy exports and the movement of livestock in the country after foot-and-mouth disease was found on a farm in southern England. Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to work "night and day" to avoid a repeat of a 2001 outbreak, when millions of dead animals were burned, swaths of the countryside closed and British meat shut out of international markets. Rural tourism also diminished.

Officials battling an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease have begun to ease the nationwide ban on animal movement from farms to slaughterhouses, but are continuing to kill animals at risk for the infection in an effort to stop its spread from southeast England.

. The buzzards led Nick Bursio to his prized calf. He found the body just over a rise in the field, with a bullet hole in its left shoulder, near the heart. Bursio had heard of animals killed by rustlers for their meat. But not until that May morning had he ever imagined anything so senseless as shooting cattle presumably just to watch them die. "I had a hollow feeling in my gut, to see that dead calf laying there, with the mother cow bellowing nearby," said the Sonoma County rancher.