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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For the first time, USDA has tracked subsidy benefits as they pass through tens of thousands of farm business entities—agribusiness cooperatives, partnerships, joint ventures and corporations—and has assigned virtually all farm subsidy 'benefits' to individuals.
Every year, the Central Valley Project moves more than 2 trillion gallons of water - about 18 percent of California's fresh water supply - to thousands of farms in the state's arid heartland. Massive pumps push the water through 1,437 miles of canals.
Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) today (March 17) unveiled legislation to reauthorize child nutrition programs and increase nutrition funding by $4.5 billion over 10 years. Of the total, $1.2 billion would increase the number of children who receive food and $3.2 billion would go toward delivering higher quality meals intended to fight childhood obesity.
This year millions of dollars of emergency agricultural disaster aid will go to the very same farmers and ranchers who have collected it every other year, or more frequently, for decades.
