**A U.S. delegation will travel to Beijing next week for trade talks with Chinese officials.

Agweb.com reports, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Jeffrey Gerrish will lead the Trump team, which will also include Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs David Malpass.

It will be the first face-to-face discussion the two sides have held since President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping agreed on a 90-day truce in Argentina last month.

**Forget the pundits telling you the U.S. is losing, or will lose, the trade war. As both sides take their hits, the Chinese stock market and certain industries there are taking it on the chin with a nonexistent industrial profit growth.

As reported by Forbes.com, industrial profit growth fell to 1.8% year over year in November from a positive 3.6% in October. Although that number is positive and not the hard landing China bears have been predicting, November’s negative numbers come for a seventh straight month and the lowest since January 2016.

**A key provision of the farm bill removes hemp from the list of federally controlled substances, treating it now like a regular crop.

And according to agweb.com, Kentucky is hoping to get a step ahead of the game by submitting federal applications.

State Ag Commissioner Ryan Quarles says they’ve received more than 1,000 applications to participate in the 2019 hemp program. Last year, participants grew more than 6,700 acres of hemp.

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