College football: Florida, Georgia vying to end SEC East’s conference championship drought.
Florida has the intriguing transfer quarterback and has won 19 games over the past two seasons under coach Jim McElwain.
Despite the lopsided nature of last year’s game, Florida safety Duke Dawson believes the Gators can close the gap in a hurry.
Georgia’s chances for success this season could largely rely on its star running backs — seniors Nick Chubb and Sony Michel.
Georgia hasn’t played in the SEC championship game since 2012 and hasn’t won a league title since 2005.
Mason has nine starters returning on offense, including Ralph Webb, who ran for 1,283 yards and 13 touchdowns last season.
"I couldn’t wait to be a junior-senior football team in this conference," Mason said.
Mississippi State is trying to make a bowl game for an eighth-straight season under coach Dan Mullen.
Junior quarterback Nick Fitzgerald returns after throwing for 2,423 yards and running for 1,375 yards last season.
He said the junior’s attention to detail will determine whether he becomes a great quarterback.

Cape beautification project stalled by drought.
CAPE CORAL, Fla. – A beautification project at the gateway of the Yacht Club is nearly complete.
But some neighbors living nearby say it looks far from it, though.
"You can tell they started, but it seems like they got lost for a little bit of time," said Carol Macone.
It comes with a price tag of about $140,000.
The money is going toward updating medians with new vegetation and an irrigation system.
"It was very unsightly but as long as there are steps being taken to finish that’s fine with us," said John Pope.
The city said the drought stalled crews from planting new vegetation.
This was done to prevent any use of the irrigation system while the fresh water canals were drying up.
"It’s one of the main routes in Cape Coral, so I’m very excited they’re doing it," said Macone.

Farmers and ranchers won’t be the only South Dakotans hit hard by the drought conditions found throughout the state.
“It’s definitely a concern,” Runia said of the drought.
The years 2002 and 2006 had similar climate conditions to what South Dakota has seen so far in 2017.
The counties in the Missouri River valley now boast the state’s highest pheasant production.
The problem is that central and western South Dakota counties tend to experience drought more often and more severely than counties to the east.
In bad years, that same habitat can still provide at least some of a pheasant’s needs.
One of the newest GF&P programs aimed at creating those types of habitats is the brood-plot program.
The program gives landowners free seeds for flowering plants than can be used for wildlife food plots.
The flowering plants provide two things: the first is a canopy for pheasant chicks to hide under and move through, and the second is a buffet of insects for the chicks to eat.
That amounts to about 2,500 of the roughly 10,000 food-plot acres for which GF&P provides seed.

She provided an overview of the State Water Project facilities, project purposes, key agreements and requirements under which the State Water Project must operate, Delta operations, how the water allocation to our contractors is determined, and the challenges they face in operating the State Water Project.
There are several key agreements and requirements under which the State Water Project operates.
There are also State Water Resources Control Board permit and conditions: Water Rights Decision 1641 has water quality and outflow standards that both the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project have to meet; there is also a water quality certification for Lake Oroville as part of the hydropower relicensing.
“One thing in managing for fish, we’re seeing more of increasing requirements for fish protection and enhancement, but we’re also seeing actions upstream and in the Delta,” Ms. Petitt-Polhemus said.
The Sacramento River flows in from the north; three-quarters of the water in an average year is from the reservoirs; in drier years, up to 90% of the inflow coming into the Delta is from reservoir releases, Ms. Petitt-Polhemus said.
“We use forecasts to help with our inflows or flows, and that helps with planning and how we operate in the Delta.
There is also the Delta consumptive use and return flow from the over 1800 agricultural diversions in the Delta; they are taking water out, and then you have their return flow coming from their irrigated lands, and so that has an effect on water quality and flow and the hydrodynamics within the Delta.” There are also the tidal conditions.
“What happens is, when you think of the exceedance probabilities, you have 50 and a 90, and eventually the 50 is going to go the 90 or the 90 is going to up to the 50, and we’ve seen that this year in our allocations, we had a lower allocation and our final allocation is 100% for north of Delta and 85% for south of Delta, and that’s because the 90 moves up to the 50%.” Storage conditions are also considered, not only what’s in State Water Project reservoirs, but also the reservoirs within the Central Valley Project.
There are a lot of operational challenges for the State Water Project.
“There are times where we’ve operated to one of the State Water Resources Control Board objective versus a biological opinion, and we’ve seen that conflict, or a trade-off in the sense that if you take an action now for Delta smelt, how is that going to affect the fall salmonids, so you can have conflicting standards on species.” There are also changing in-basin demands, the timeliness of real-time monitoring, Delta uncertainty and variability, power scheduling, and facility outages, as well.

With drought worsening, ranchers turn to God.
Rancher Tim Amdahl knows it’s going to rain.
The event comes in response to ongoing drought conditions across Pennington County and other regions of the state.
Event sponsors are asking everyone to pause at 7 p.m. and pray for rain.
The idea came when Amdahl, whose ranch is located 12 miles north of Rapid City, shared his desperation over the drought with BigHorn Canyon Community Church Pastor Scott Craig.
The two contacted friends, organizations and Amy Wagner, the state coordinator for the National Day of Prayer, for support.
Forty-six of those fires occurred in June and 54 happened within the first 11 days of July.
“The agricultural producers in Pennington County are taking a really huge hit in their industry,” said Pennington County Emergency Management Director Dustin Willet.
Pennington County has sought a declaration of a local emergency related to drought conditions at least three times in the last five years, according to Willet.
The USDA authorized counties within a 150-mile radius of drought-affected areas for additional grazing at the beginning of July.

Rains ease drought, but aquifer not healthy yet.
LEESBURG — The drought is over — for now — in Lake County, which continues to get pummeled by heavy afternoon rains almost daily, according to state water officials.
The St. Johns River Water Management District says the rain has erased the drought, but cautioned that the aquifer, from which Florida draws most of its drinking water, still hasn’t rebounded to satisfactory levels.
“Despite this recent rainfall, we need to stay committed to our water conservation efforts,” St. Johns River Water Management District Executive Director Ann Shortelle said in a release from the district on Tuesday.
“Our team continues to closely monitor hydrologic data within the district as we work to ensure sufficient water for people and the environment.” Rainfall varied widely from one end of the 19-county Water Management District to the other in June.
The northern reaches of the district tended to get more rain, led by Putnam County with a whopping 16.17 inches and Alachua with 14.54.
Lake got 11 inches in June, which is almost four inches more than average for June.
For the past 12 months, however, rainfall in Lake is still 6.74 inches below average, according to the Water Management District.
The Water Shortage Warning that the district put into effect in March remains in place for now, officials said.
The order encourages all water users to reduce their water use and voluntarily conserve water to the maximum extent possible, and to adhere to year-round watering restrictions.

Southwest Iowa Faces Drought Conditions.
It was hot and dry the first full week of July according to the Iowa Crop Progress Report.
State Climatologist Harry Hillaker says it’s getting dryer across most of the state.
Southeast and south central Iowa have about 80 percent short to very short topsoil moisture rating, those are also areas of moderate drought according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
And unfortunately the weather outlook doesn’t look very favorable either.
Last year, temperatures cooled down and timely rains popped up about the second week of July.
On the crop conditions side of the report, 7 percent of Iowa’s corn crop has reached the that stage, six days behind the five-year average.
Seventy-seven percent of the corn crop was rated in good to excellent condition, down a percent from last week.
A third of the state’s soybean crop is now blooming, with five percent already setting pods about three days ahead of the average.
Soybean conditions are 67 percent good or excellent, down five percent from last week.

Developing world drought threat to EU rice and cotton intensifies research efforts.
The report, entitled Vulnerabilities of Europe’s economy to global water scarcity and drought revealed that supplies of animal feed, rice, cotton, grapes and even pistachios could be impacted in the near future as they come from regions that have a shortage of water.
‘Right now it is more like an alert,’ said Professor Bart van den Hurk, who coordinates the EU-funded IMPREX project, which produced the report as part of its efforts to analyse the links between climate change and water.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and droughts will rise over the coming years as man-made climate change takes hold.
Shocking Dr Ertug Ercin, the lead author of the report, said that they were surprised when they realised just how vulnerable some of Europe’s food products were.
‘Can you imagine the chocolate industry without cocoa,’ said Dr Ercin, from the Water Footprint Network, a Dutch non-governmental organisation which is part of the IMPREX project.
‘We always look at the supply side of the water issue,’ said said Dr Ercin.
Analysing water demand is part of a broader effort by the IMPREX project to encourage public officials and businesses to take climate change forecasts into account when making decisions by predicting how global warming will lead to extreme weather in Europe.
It’s in part driven by a personal commitment by Prof. van den Hurk to help people make better use of climate forecasts, where computer models can use satellite and ground measurements to extrapolate how climate change will affect us.
‘I’m really on a mission to embed this physical climate science further down the chain,’ he said.

The grocery store is going to have to sell to the average American consumer for more.” That is why companies with enough resources, turn to hire migrant workers through the H-2A visa program, which allows for a one-year permit renewable to 3 years, from a pool of 59 countries.
Citizenship and Immigration Services issued 6,084.
However, the process isn’t that simple, Galeazzi said.
“Right now it’s so bureaucratic, there’s so much red tape, other people in the industry actually need legal teams to come in and show them how to get their applications in to get H-2A workers.
Then there’s not guarantee that they get those workers,” Galeazzi said.
At the same time, some Texas produce companies argued foreign workers who usually fill the agricultural jobs is also shrinking.
Especially those who come to the U.S. illegally to find work.
A 30-year-old man who spoke to the KENS 5 Border team and asked to conceal his identity, said he’s fearful that authorities will suddenly arrive to round him up while working in the field.
“But as you put that pressure on there and there’s no legal, or viable system to bring workers over, well then you have a problem, right?” Just as the field laborer’s wishes are to work more freely and have a more secure job, similarly the industry is seeking more liberty to provide that work to keep up with demand.
Meanwhile, Galeazzi said he will be traveling to Washington D.C. next Tuesday where he’s expected to testify on behalf of the agriculture industry and help push for priorities such as immigration reform, trade, and infrastructure before things get too sour.

Alabama, Mississippi, Florida Declared Drought Free.
Alabama and Mississippi are completely free from drought for the first time in more than a year.
A federal assessment released at the end of June showed rains eliminated a dry spell that began in April 2016, the last time Alabama was totally drought-free.
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That’s a step below being in a drought.
Northeast Georgia still has a small area experiencing drought, and rainfall is considered normal in Louisiana.
Heavy rains throughout the month of June also wiped out drought conditions across Florida.
A new drought monitor map of Florida released at the end of June showed no dry conditions anywhere in the state.
Drinking water supplier Tampa Bay Water said June’s rains dramatically reduced daily water consumption across the region and returned most rivers to normal levels.