WASHINGTON – Some lawmakers have made clear that they intend to cut 7 million acres protected under the Conservation Reserve Program from the next farm bill. Congress has cut other critical conservation program every year since 2002.

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.

For too long, funding provided by the United States’ most far-reaching food and farm legislation has primarily benefited agri-business and large scale industrial-scale commodity farms that aren’t growing food.  Instead, they’re growing ingredients for animal feed, fuel and highly processed food -- at a high cost to our nation’s health, environment and rural communities.

Since 1995 U.S. taxpayers have sent $194 billion in subsidies to farmers including $5 billion per year in fixed direct payments paid regardless of need or crop price. Below is a list of recent EWG staff analysis on traditional, commodity crop based farm subsidy programs.

Gulf state taxpayers help fund the creation of agriculture pollution they ultimately deal with. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched a new initiative to pay Gulf Coast farm businesses in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida $50 million over the next three years to help reduce the pollution that runs off their farm fields into the public’s waters.

With deliberations on the 2012 farm bill due to begin in January, EWG looks at how the industrial agriculture lobby dominates the hearing process, leaving little room for good food reformers.

Details became public today of a farm bill proposal written in secret by the top leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees and sent this week to the Congressional “Super Committee.” As Environmental Working Group had predicted, huge grain and cotton operations would harvest a windfall in taxpayer dollars while hardworking American families that are just scraping by would be badly hurt by cuts to vital nutrition programs such as SNAP (formerly called food stamps).

Industrial agriculture’s lobbyists and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies have been working overtime to skirt the usual democratic process and write a new five-year farm bill behind closed doors.

The Congressional Super Committee was created to make tough budget choices, but the leaders of the Ag Committees appear to be going in the opposite direction with more lavish subsidy giveaways to mega farms.