The Daily Dirt — Morning Edition

The window from the afternoon of June 22 into the early hours of June 23 pushed forward several threads this desk has been tracking. Here is what moved.

Forever Chemicals, Farm Fields, California’s Water

EWG’s June 2026 analysis documented a contamination pathway that often gets missed in the PFAS conversation: farm-applied PFAS pesticides — fungicides, herbicides, and other crop chemicals built around fluorine-carbon bonds that do not break down in soil or water — are migrating from agricultural fields into California’s rivers, streams, and sediment through runoff and irrigation return flows.

The distinction from the industrial PFAS problem matters. Military-base contamination comes from a single point source; agricultural PFAS contamination comes from millions of acres of treated fields. California’s Central Valley, where an intricate water distribution network moves water through irrigation districts and out to farms and municipal systems, creates conditions where the contamination spreads. When PFAS enters that network from farm fields, it creates a feedback loop: chemicals applied to protect one season’s crops contaminate the water that irrigates the next.

AB 1603 — California’s bill to phase out 53 PFAS pesticides by 2035, which cleared the Assembly in May and moved to the Senate — is the legislative response. But the contamination already in the water is the prior condition that makes the ban urgent. More context in our California PFAS coverage.

Screwworm: The Border, in Their Own Words

Farm Press is convening perspectives from ranchers on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border on the New World Screwworm situation — a deliberate choice to let the people operating under the most direct risk speak in their own terms rather than relay the situation through agency announcements.

The screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) was eradicated from the United States in the 1960s through a sterile-insect technique program run jointly with Mexico. It was never eradicated from Central America. The fly has been moving north, and its detection in Mexican cattle triggered a USDA suspension of live cattle imports from Mexico earlier this year — affecting both US ranchers who rely on Mexican stocker cattle and Mexican producers dealing with active infestations on their own operations.

What cross-border accounts tend to surface that agency releases don’t: the practical weight of operating in a biosecurity perimeter — movement restrictions, required inspections, disrupted sale patterns, the cost of uncertainty when you’re planning a year-long cattle cycle. Our screwworm analysis has the fuller picture on what a US re-infestation would mean economically.

H-2A: Courts Ruled, Congress Notices

In April, the Trump administration cut the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) — the federal minimum wage for H-2A agricultural guestworkers, set by the Department of Labor to prevent the program from undercutting domestic farmworker wages — by up to $5 per hour in some states. A second rule change allowed employers who provide housing to deduct an additional $2–$3 per hour from base pay.

Courts upheld the cuts in May after the UFW and allies sought to block them. As of mid-June, a Congressional reform bill is circulating — a legislative attempt to restore wage protections that the executive rule changes removed. Whether it has the votes to move is an open question.

The on-the-ground impact is most visible in states with large H-2A workforces. In North Carolina — a top H-2A state where guest workers fill roles in tobacco, sweet potatoes, and Christmas trees — Spanish-language and farmworker media have been tracking 2026 wage rates closely, a sign of how acutely the farmworker community is monitoring a policy change that often gets discussed in abstract terms in English-language coverage. Our H-2A wage analysis covers the legal fight and what the cuts mean structurally for the program’s original purpose.

The Farm Finance Squeeze

The American Farm Bureau Federation raised an alarm in February: farm loan sizes have been growing as input costs stay elevated, and farmers are now servicing those larger loans at higher interest rates than the near-zero environment that prevailed through 2021. The result is a farm income model that is getting squeezed from multiple directions simultaneously.

Chapter 12 family farmer filings are the downstream read on this squeeze — and they have been trending up. But Chapter 12 data captures the endpoint, not the journey. The journey for many operations is months of drawing down equity, renegotiating terms with lenders, and making cuts before the bankruptcy option comes into focus. Our farm bankruptcy coverage has the structural detail.

What to Watch

• DOJ meatpacker probe: The Justice Department called publicly for whistleblowers when it confirmed its antitrust investigation in May. Whether insiders with documentation of price coordination or bid-rigging come forward will determine if the probe reaches a consequential conclusion — or stalls at the investigation stage under a changing political wind.
• Farm bill markup: Senate Agriculture Committee timing on the markup will set funding levels for regional food programs that connect small farms to buyers outside the commodity pipeline. Whether the bipartisan regional food bill survives intact is a test of whether that constituency has real political weight right now.
• H-2A state responses: With the federal floor cut and courts upholding the cuts, watch whether California, New York, North Carolina, or other large H-2A-using states pursue state-level wage protections. That would be a significant shift in how farmworker labor standards get set — from federal to state.

— Save US Farms Desk