A day after the Senate Agriculture committee passed its version of the 2013 farm bill, the House committee did the same.

The reality is that the nation’s primary prairie and wetlands protection program – the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) – was not designed to meet the environmental challenges being created by record prices for farm commodities. Because the majority of the land in the program is taken out of agricultural production under 10- and 15-year rental agreements with the owners, cropland that had been “restored” with grasses and trees is increasingly being plowed under to grow crops again as soon as these agreements expire. As a result, the benefits of taxpayers’ investment in these short-term agreements have proved to be fleeting.

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 su

Federally subsidized crop insurance is now the most expensive program supporting farm income, so it’s no surprise that it will be at the center of the Senate Agriculture Committee’s deliberations on the 2013 farm bill, starting later this month. And as it happens, last year’s epic drought, which decimated crops across a wide swath of America, afforded a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of a program whose costs have ballooned to $9 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Last week, the Environmental Working Group released a report analyzing antibiotic resistance of bacteria detected in supermarket meat. We unearthed data buried deep in the annual report of theNational Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, a federal food safety effort run by the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our report struck at nerve at FDA.  The agency issued a statement calling it “misleading” and “alarmist.”  You can read our full response here.  Essentially, the FDA argued that antibiotic resistance to only one drug is not that big of a deal because there are still some other antibiotics that could treat bacterial infections – for now.

Minnesota Congressman Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) struck a nerve this month when he said that “there is five times as much fraud” in the federal crop insurance program as there is the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.

EWG argues for reform of farm programs to reduce the misuse of antibiotics in livestock production after analysis of recent government tests reveal more and more supermarket meat harbors antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The departure of Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “leaves a gaping hole in the Obama administration's leadership on food and agriculture policy,” Environmental Working Group’s president Ken Cook said today.