Good afternoon and welcome to the Sprout, where it’s National Gumdrop Day. Tootsie lists the ingredients to its gumdrops as: corn syrup, sugar, modified food starch, malic acid, natural and artificial flavours, sodium citrate and artificial colours. Yum!

Here’s today’s agriculture news.

The Lead

The Coalition Avenir Québec government is facing mounting pressure to reinstate a former public servant after he was fired from his job last month after exposing private-sector meddling in pesticide research.

Elected members from all three opposition parties in the National Assembly have been critical of how the CAQ government treated Louis Robert, who served 32 years with the Ministry of Agriculture.

Robert provided documents to Radio-Canada last year, which exposed attempts by the grain industry to influence government-funded research into pesticides. That’s from CBC.

Around Town

Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay is in Charlottetown, near his riding of Cardigan, where he’s scheduled to be joined by Prince Edward Island’s Education, Culture, Justice and Public Safety Minister Jordan Brown, to announce new measures to increase access to treatment for substance use. That’s at 2 p.m., locally.

MPs return to the House of Commons on Tuesday after their weeklong break.

In Canada

Newfoundland and Labrador’s Fisheries and Land Resources Minister Gerry Byrne blamed previous provincial governments for ignoring farming in the province for 65 years, in an interview with the CBC. “We are changing that,” he said.

The province has lost more than 3,000 farms since Confederation. Byrne’s Liberals have protected around 150,000 acres of farmland by making the land available for agriculture leases, which would assure it’s not sold for residential or commercial development. Here’s more on what’s happening for the industry in the province.

Internationally

Australian Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said the country has contained two detections of foot-and-mouth disease in meat products that were declared and seized at airports, since December. As ABC Rural reports, if the disease was spread from the country it could threaten its multibillion dollar livestock industry.

An unexpected daylong snowstorm killed more than 1,800 dairy cows across dozens of farms in Washington state. The death toll is reported by the Independent to be worth $3.2 million to farmers.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted bad news for American farmers. It expects soybean exports to remain below their pre-trade war levels until 2026-2027. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City also warned that farm incomes would likely have a weak start in 2019. That’s from Bloomberg.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s declaring a national emergency to build a wall across the country’s border with Mexico. Trump plans to use the move to bypass Congress and spend more money on the structure. He’s been given about $1.4 billion for border barriers, which is well below the $5.7 billion that he says he needs for the project. That’s from CBC.

Noteworthy

The Kicker

Since it’s Friday, here’s two kickers:

British Prime Minister Theresa May isn’t one to be wasteful. The Daily Mail reports that she told senior ministers earlier this week that she will not throw away a jar of jam that’s gone mouldy, instead choosing to scrape off the mould off and eat what’s underneath.

And finally, Japanese scientists think they’ve discovered a cure for baldness — a chemical used to make McDonald’s fries. A research group from Yokohama National University used a “simple” method to regrow mice’s hair using the type of silicone that’s added to McDonald’s fries to stop cooking oil from frothing. That’s from Newsweek.

That’s all for this week. Have a good long weekend. We’ll be back on Tuesday.