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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With these comments, EWG directs the California Air Resources Board’s attention to deficiencies in the Climate Change Proposed Scoping Plan with respect to agriculture. At present, the Plan undervalues both the current role of agriculture in global warming emissions and the capacity of the sector to reduce these emissions.
Behind the thin green gloss Congressional leaders spread across the subsidy-laden 2008 farm bill, key Democratic lawmakers are hacking away at promises to expand conservation and other environmental programs. Without proper conservation funding, few resources are available to mitigate the environmental damage caused by modern commodity crop agriculture.
U.S. farmers are planting fence-row-to-fence-row to produce enough corn to supply ethanol plants and at the same time meet burgeoning demand for food and feed crops. The intensification of corn production—spurred in large part by exploding ethanol production—threatens to exacerbate global warming and harm water quality, water supply, and wildlife habitat. Read the Report
When the Bush administration and Congress required gasoline refiners to blend in 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol by 2015, they made the impossibly rosy assumption that American farmers would always enjoy good weather. But as every farmer knows, years with perfect growing conditions are uncommon and getting more rare.
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.
