USDA View of the Department of Agriculture, The Smithsonian Castle and the U.S. Capitol taken from atop the Washington Monument circa 1900.

Happy birthday, USDA.

Chris Clayton writes here on the history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. President Lincoln signed the legislation creating the USDA May 15, 1862 — that's right, 150 years ago today.

At the time, 90 percent of Americans were connected to farming. A proposal to create a department of agriculture had been kicked around Congress throughout the 1850s, but never passed. (The legislature was gridlocked over slavery.) In addition to this bill, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which created the nation's system of colleges emphasizing agriculture and the mechanical arts.

President Obama issued a proclamation, saying in part:

The USDA has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American people for generations. During the Great Depression, the Department helped bring an end to the Dust Bowl by promoting soil conservation. Through two World Wars, the Victory Garden Program fed troops and families around the world. The USDA worked to bring electric power to rural communities, establish the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and School Lunch Programs, implement our Nation's food safety regulations, and protect our forests and private lands. For one-and-a-half centuries, USDA has empowered communities across our country and helped ensure we leave our children a future rich with promise and possibility.

• Western states are rumbling. 

The New York Times This is downtown Chester, Vermont. There's a controversy here and in four other Vermont towns about whether dollar stores should be allowed to be built.

Philip Boffey writes that they tried a taste test at the New York Times. They cooked some burgers with "lean finely textured beef" (otherwise known as "pink slime") and some others that were slime free. He writes:

As for how it tastes, we conducted a test at the Times cafeteria and in my home kitchen of ground beef patties, some in which pink slime made up 15 percent and others without it. Four of our testers, including me, preferred the burgers with pink slime. I found it more tender. Three others preferred the burgers without. No one found any of the burgers slimy.

Boffey finds the whole episode "unfair" and he counts the number of workers laid off from beef processing plants that have closed because of a decreased demand for beef since the "pink slime" controversy began. (Some 650 workers have lost their jobs in three states.)

The way to keep such controversies from happening, he writes, is to disclose what's in food. "Americans need to know more about the food they eat, and the efforts being taken to ensure that it is safe," he concludes.

• There's a fight in Chester, Vermont, over Dollar General. Quite a few folks don't want a 9,100 square food discount store on South Main Street.

“People come here and stay at the inns and eat at the restaurants not because we have Disney World but because we have Chester,” said Claudio Veliz, an architect who moved here from New York. “That is the hull of our boat, and Dollar General wants to put its fist right through the hull.”

This is Loretta Lynn's childhood home in Butcher Holler, Kentucky. The singer's story is coming to Broadway and she'll be played by Zooey Deschanel.

Save The Post Office doesn't think much of the plan to keep rural post offices open that was announced this week by the Postal Service: 

After a year and a half spent threatening to close thousands of rural post offices, the Postal Service has suddenly changed course. Instead of closing small post offices, the Postal Service has come up with a way to make them irrelevant.