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In March of 2019, the Trump administration ended India’s status as a beneficiary of the American system known as Generalized System of Preferences. The action seems to have been in retaliation to India not providing, in the Trump administration’s view, enough access for American business in India. In response, reports Capital Press, the Washington State Department of Agriculture worked quickly to create a non-GMO label for apples everyone knows aren’t genetically modified, in order for Washington growers to sell their apples with a gigantic 70-percent tariff to India. It is not a situation that Washington apple producers are particularly happy about, and Capital Press says that growers are hoping that the new Biden administration will work with the Indian government to come up with some solution that benefits both sides.

Dubbed the American Jobs Plan, the eight-year spending proposal promises to modernize 20,000 miles of roads, repair 10,000 bridges and improve the drinking water in 400,000 schools and child-care facilities, among myriad other improvements to the built environment in the United States. Lost time along the way from congestion and other delays is lost money for farmers in the short term and lost market share in the long term, which is why groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have been pushing Biden to improve rural transportation networks since he took office. The more noticeable impact on farmers’ everyday lives, meanwhile, would be the $100 billion that Biden wants to spend bringing affordable broadband internet service to every American, including the estimated 35 percent of whom currently lack reliable access. But general support for rural broadband isn’t the same as specific support for Biden’s plan, particularly given that it is nested inside his larger multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure effort

It’s most often created from cannabidiol, or CBD, a compound in industrial hemp that achieved some level of popularity owing to its legal status, but which doesn’t provide the high that THC does. The 2018 Farm Bill contains a note that “synthetically derived tetrahydrocannabinols” are illegal, but that was probably written to refer to drugs such as Spice and K2, which are essentially neutral plants (such as mint or tea) sprinkled with a lab-created drug that stimulates some of the same parts of the brain as THC does. Delta-8, on the other hand, is not exactly synthetically created; it’s usually created from CBD, which is a fully legal plant-based isolate. In the meantime: Just know that, while Delta-8 isn’t exactly illegal, it’s not exactly legal either, and more importantly, nobody knows whether it’s safe or what a proper dose is.

But Gates, despite some interests in food technology, was simply doing what wealthy investors have been doing, in increasing volume, for years: treating farmland as a commodity, a particularly rock-solid investment that can be flipped later for a profit. In Iowa, finds a study by Iowa State University, an acre of cropland gained 1.7 percent in value just in 2020—and that’s with food systems massively disrupted. The chief problem is a farmer’s inability to control, or often even own, their own land, which puts a tremendous amount of control in the hands of a person or entity that is not farming that land. These landlords, many of which are simply investors or investment groups, can raise rent prices to the point where farmers can’t make a profit, because the value of the land continues to increase.