The food we produce and the way we produce it has profound effects—good or bad—on our health, quality of life and the environment. On these pages you will learn what EWG is doing to protect your health and environment while ensuring a sustainable future for America’s working farms and ranches.
Farmers can do more than producing food and fiber. They can also produce clean air, clean water, and abundant habitat for wildlife. But farm policies are doing too little to reward good stewardship and too much to underwrite unsustainable crop and animal production by the largest and most successful farm businesses.
EWG’s renowned farm subsidy database reveals that taxpayer support goes mostly to large, profitable operations, not to sustainable family farms that truly need the help. We’re working to change a badly broken system.
Food should be good for you. But some foods aren’t. Pesticides are sprayed on millions of acres every year and some of them end up on your food. Our broken farm subsidy system encourages over production of the wrong food. EWG is pushing for better policy and more sustainable ways of farming that produce healthy food in a healthy environment.
Nothing is more important to your health and quality of life than safe drinking water and clean streams and lakes. Across the country, pollution from farms is one of the primary reasons water is no longer clean or safe. Agriculture is the leading source of pollution of rivers and streams surveyed by U.S. government experts, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Thankfully, if we make simple changes in the way we farm, we can take a big step toward clean water.
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Letter sent by a coalition of environmental groups, including EWG, to congressional leadership requesting support of the March 18, 2008 Farm Bill “Framework’s” $4.951 billion increase in new funds above baseline for the bill’s voluntary, incentives-based conservation programs.
The concentrated, predictable, repetitive nature of agricultural disaster aid among a few states with perennially poor growing conditions raises the question of whether the time has come for states to assume a primary role in providing agricultural disaster assistance within their borders.
Due to lax standards and implementation problems, USDA's conservation compliance program is missing cost-effective opportunities to make further, substantial reductions in cropland soil erosion and agriculture-related toxic run-off. Conservation compliance is critical to mitigating the damage agriculture related pollution does to streams, waterways and the Gulf of Mexico.
On balance, this House farm bill will be remembered as a missed opportunity for reform of federal farm policies that are broken at their core. It also represents a failure of House leadership to serve the broader needs of the nation, instead of taking their cues at every turn from the farm subsidy lobby.
Black farmers receive between one-third to one-sixth of the benefits under major federal crop subsidy programs that other farmers receive, and the “subsidy gap” has widened over the past decade.
