Business Blog

At 7:22 a.m. Tuesday, workers made the first cut to Auburn University’s famed oaks at Toomer’s Corner. From a bucket truck, a worker removed the first branch from the tree on College Street, Mobile’s AL.com reports. Crews then moved back and forth between the two trees, removing large segments of the more than 80-year-old oaks [...]

Even if their farms were not in the path of the April 11 tornado, hundreds of farmers will feel the loss of the massive communications tower in Noxubee County. The 300-foot-tall microwave tower located in the middle of a soybean field just northeast of Macon provided about 200 farmers and others with broadband Internet and [...]

Mississippi State University has been designated a Center of Excellence for Watershed Management, becoming the 10th such institution in the Southeast. Representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and Mississippi State University signed a Memorandum of Understanding today to help communities identify watershed-based problems and develop and [...]

Customers of Mississippi restaurants will now know whether the catfish on their table is domestically produced or is an imported variety of catfish-like pangasius, also sold as basa, tra and swai. Mississippi producers persuaded legislators this month to amend the state’s catfish Country of Origin Labeling law to require restaurants to also identify the origin [...]

Catfish producers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South notched a key victory last week with a Commerce Department decision to put duties on frozen catfish fillets exported from Vietnam. The Commerce Department ruling marks a reversal of several years of refusing to place tariffs on government-subsidized Vietnamese pangasius catfish imported to the United States [...]

Here is the White House says the across-the-board automatic budget cuts set to begin Friday under the fiscal sequester deal between Congress and the Obama Administration will mean for Mississippi. The cuts threaten hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs, and cut vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and [...]

While individual motorists are feeling the pain at the pump from near daily increases in the per gallon price of gasoline, the rising prices are likely to stunt the already meager growth in Mississippi’s overall economy, a state senior economist says. Combined with the Jan. 1 return of a 2 percent portion of the payroll [...]

Get used to the idea of $85 billion in automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs starting next Friday under a sequester deal Congress made with the White House in August 2011. At least that’s the indication U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper gave during a stop Wednesday at the Mississippi Capitol for the Madison County Business [...]

  AgFax Media partners, Owen Taylor and Debra Ferguson, were recently recognized with an award for their service as agricultural journalists at the 57th Annual Tri-State Soybean Forum held in Stoneville, Mississippi. The annual meeting is attended by farmers from Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Both Taylor and Ferguson are native Mississippians. Taylor was born and [...]

Recent sustained rains and melting snow across the Mississippi Valley will ensure continuing navigation on the Mississippi River through mid-February, even if no additional rain falls between now and Feb. 15, the Army Corps of Engineers says. The period from Jan. 9-13 saw three-eighths inches of rain, with10+ inches locally, over the Ohio River Valley [...]