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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The largest and wealthiest U.S. farm businesses received the biggest share of almost $33 billion in payments from two subsidy programs – one created by the Trump administration to respond to the president’s trade war and the other by Congress in response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to updates to EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database.
For people who live near industrial animal feedlots, the stench, flies and day-and-night rumbling of trucks are more than a nuisance that impairs the use and enjoyment of their own property. Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs – whether swine, cattle or poultry – also pose serious health threats.
EWG has found 377 news reports of agricultural pollution contaminating drinking water in 303 locations since 2010. With four months left in 2020, 38 of those cities, towns and counties have suffered from contaminated drinking water so far this year.
If you’re headed for the lake or river this Labor Day weekend, be on the lookout for outbreaks of potentially toxic algae. Through the end of August, algae blooms have plagued 318 bodies of water across the U.S., with many more expected in September and beyond.
For decades, R.D. Offutt – one of the largest agriculture conglomerates in the U.S. – has proudly evaded meaningful environmental review in Minnesota. Offutt has played a shell game using land swaps with family farmers to hide the true scale of its industrial-scale potato growing and processing operations in the vulnerable Pineland Sands area.
