Our land, our food, our water
Reports & Consumer Guides
Worth Protecting: Our land, our food, our water
America's farmland is worth protecting. Farmers can do more than producing food and fiber. They can also produce clean air, clean water, and abundant habitat for wildlife.
Many farmers are producing food in ways that protect family farms and the environment. 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.
To protect America’s families, farms and natural heritage, Congress must enact a farm bill that fully funds conservation programs, that links farm subsidies to environmental protection, and that supports transition to farming practices that reduce the need for antibiotics, toxic pesticides and hormones. Conservation programs must be reformed to produce longer-term protection of air, water and soil and to encourage farmers to work together to deliver these public goods.
Blogs
Conservation Success Stories
Dick and Linda Grotberg began their transition to sustainable farming largely by accident.
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Balancing Act Would Protect Food, Farms And Families
We think America's families, farmers and food are worth protecting. That's why EWG is proud to support the Balancing Food, Farm and Environment Act introduced today (May 9) in the House and Senate.
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Hail to the Chiefs
Six former chiefs of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service today (May 7) urged the leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees to once again require farmers to adopt basic conservation practices in exchange for crop insurance subsidies.
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Satellite Study Documents Vast Loss Of Midwest Grasslands
America’s Midwest and Great Plains are often derisively described as fly-over country. And now unblinking, data-collecting satellites soaring over the western Corn Belt have recorded a devastating manmade environmental disaster.
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Green Slime
We’ve all heard of pink slime. Now, there’s green slime too. Unregulated pollution from farm fields is triggering slimy green blooms of algae around the globe, according to National Geographic. Its story documents how fertilizers that wash off farm fields feed massive growth of algae, setting off chemical chain reactions that create low-oxygen “dead zones” where fish and other aquatic life cannot survive.
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Meet The New Dust Bowl, Same As The Old Dust Bowl
Ken Burns, America’s premiere documentarian, has tackled topics from jazz to the Civil War. His new film chronicles the Dust Bowl, the massive ecological disaster that plagued a large swath of U. S. farmland during the 1930’s
Read MoreReports
Losing Ground
Across wide swaths of Iowa and other Corn Belt states, the rich, dark soil that made this region the nation’s breadbasket is being swept away at rates many times higher than official estimates. That is the disturbing picture revealed by new techniques that track soil erosion with unprecedented precision.Read More
Plowed Under
High crop prices and unlimited crop insurance subsidies contributed to the loss of more than 23 million acres of grassland, shrub land and wetlands between 2008 and 2011, wiping out habitat that sustains many species of birds and other animals and threatening the diversity of North America’s wildlife, new research by Environmental Working Group and Defenders of Wildlife shows. Read More
Conservation Compliance
America’s farmers need a safety net, but so do the rich soil and clean water that sustain not just agriculture but the entire fabric of American society. Read More
Honor the Conservation Compact
Some commitments should be honored. In exchange for farm subsidies, farmers have for decades committed to adopt land management practices that reduce the runoff from their fields – a provision of the 1985 farm bill called "conservation compliance." Read More