Farms and ranches cover more than half of all land in the United States. Farm bill conservation programs and policies work to keep the land productive and to protect soil, water and wildlife. These programs and policies are needed now more than ever as high prices spur all-out production. Yet Congress is proposing to cut program funding and weaken critical conservation policies.

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Blogs

The Case for Crop Insurance Reform

Crop insurance has quietly become the primary source of federal subsidies for farmers. The cost to taxpayers of heavily subsidized crop insurance has steadily increased – from $2 billion in 2001 to $9 billion in 2011. A program once intended to reduce the need for ad hoc disaster payments has become far more costly than policymakers ever imagined Read More

Lawmakers Could Look To Farm Bill For $100 Billion In Additional Budget Savings

EWG’s Scott Faber joined representatives of several fiscally conservative organizations in calling on Congress not to slip a full farm bill reauthorization into any legislative package they cobble together to avoid the imminent "fiscal cliff." They urged lawmakers instead to pass a responsible one-year extension of current farm and food policies and give members of the House time for full consideration and debate of the farm bill next year. Read More

Crop Insurance: Bad For Taxpayers, Bad For The Environment

Unlimited crop insurance subsidies lead growers to make planting decisions that are bad for the environment, two of the nation’s most respected agricultural economists conclude in a newly published paper. Read More

Unlimited Subsidies, High Prices Threaten “Prairie Potholes”

High crop prices combined with unlimited insurance subsidies are contributing to the rapid loss of wetlands and prairie grasslands in the “prairie pothole” region of North and South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa. Photo courtesy of USDA NRCS.  Read More

Safety Net Or Trampoline?

Marcia Zarley Taylor recently posted a blog aptly titled Extreme Insurance. As executive editor of DTN, which publishes The Progressive Farmer magazine and website, Taylor is one of the more cogent observers of crop insurance and this year’s drought. Read More

Secret Lobby For Secret Safety Net

Few Americans know that taxpayers finance a $90 billion crop insurance program that provides millions in subsidies to highly profitable farm businesses and insurance companies. Read More

News Releases

Government Records Show Crop Insurance Subsidies Are A Boon To Big Farm Interests:

A new analysis of over a million government records never before made public and obtained by the Environmental Working Group through the Freedom of Information Act has found that in 2011 more than 10,000 individual farming operations have received federal crop insurance premium subsidies ranging from $100,000 to more than $1 million apiece. Some 26 farming operations received subsidies of $1 million or more last year. Read More

Nation’s Drought Highlights Need For Crop Insurance Reform

What is happening this year is compelling evidence – if more evidence was needed – that farmers need a safety net. The government should step in when farmers suffer potentially crippling losses because of bad weather or other circumstances that are out of their control. Crop insurance could and should be that safety net. But the dramatic structural changes Congress made to crop insurance in 2000 will threaten the fiscal and political sustainability of crop insurance as this drought highlights the serious unintended consequences of those changes. Read More

Foreign Companies Paid Billions To Run U.S. Crop Insurance Program

Twenty insurance companies in Bermuda, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and the U.S. were paid $7.1 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds from 2007 to 2011 to sell American farmers crop insurance policies, an Environmental Working Group analysis shows. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency paid these companies for administrative and operating expenses for the federally subsidized crop insurance program.Read More

Reports

The Impact of Scaling Back

In a drive to get farmers to insure more of their crops, Congress voted in 2000 to make major changes in how the federal crop insurance program works. The Agricultural Risk Protection Act (ARPA) passed that year had two important consequences. It dramatically increased the share of premiums paid by taxpayers and it extended the premium subsidy system that had previously applied only to insurance against lost crop yield to policies that protected farmers against lost revenue.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

The Revenue Insurance Boondoggle

As a Congressional “Super Committee” presses to meet its Nov. 23 deadline to come up with a deficit reduction proposal, powerful farm state legislators and agricultural industry lobbyists have moved to hijack the process of rewriting the federal farm bill and enact a new, multi-billion dollar entitlement for the largest, most profitable farming operations.Read More

Giving it Away Free

A simple, free program to insure farmers against actual crop losses at full market price would be cheaper and fairer than today’s hopelessly inefficient and costly system. Read More