Research

The Federal Crop Insurance Program is a federally subsidized program that pays farmers when their crop yields or revenues decline, expending billions of taxpayer dollars each year.

Drinking water supplies for almost 60 million people living in major cities and other urban areas throughout the U.S. are contaminated with elevated levels of nitrate, according to a new EWG analysis...

The Environmental Working Group presents an innovative “water atlas” tracking phosphorous and nitrate pollution in four Upper Mississippi River Basin states.

EWG has developed a mapping tool to track the effectiveness of U.S. Department of Agriculture programs and identify opportunities for county-level efforts to improve water quality, climate resiliency...

The Department of Agriculture has known for almost a century that planting cover crops between growing seasons benefits soil, water and air quality. Now the USDA, heartland politicians and the...

A new EWG interactive map shows results of state tests for the algae bloom toxin microcystin across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Our analysis found that much more regular microcystin monitoring is...

Taxpayer-funded farm subsidies have long been skewed in favor of the richest farmers and landowners. But under the Trump administration, even more money went to the largest and wealthiest farms...

Timeline: Black farmers and the USDA, 1920 to present

In California's San Joaquin Valley, the nation's leading agricultural region, Latinos make up the great majority of farmworkers.

Either toxic algae or potentially dangerous fecal bacteria forced the closure of at least 116 U.S. beaches this spring and summer and triggered health warnings at 162 more, according to a new analysis...

Communities across the United States have spent more than $1 billion since 2010 dealing with outbreaks of potentially toxic algae in lakes, rivers, bays and drinking water supplies, according to an...

In the past eight years, three predominantly Black, Native American and Latino counties in North Carolina – already home to most of the state's industrial hog operations – added 30 million chickens...

In much of America's farm country, nitrate contamination of drinking water, largely caused by polluted runoff from crop fields, poses a serious health risk – and the problem is getting worse...

In almost all of Minnesota's farm counties, the combination of manure plus commercial fertilizer is likely to load too much nitrogen or phosphorus or both onto crop fields, threatening drinking water...

By spending billions to upgrade the nation’s failing water infrastructure, Congress can create tens of thousands of jobs and significantly improve the safety of drinking water supplies.

In the face...

More than 2 million Americans in hundreds of small, mostly rural communities are drinking water with levels of nitrate that increase the risk of some cancers, according to a recent comprehensive...

Nitrate contamination of drinking water is getting worse in much of rural Minnesota, an Environmental Working Group analysis of state data found.

The number of large concentrated animal feeding operations, or large CAFOs, in Iowa increased nearly fivefold in the past two decades, a new study from Environmental Working Group reveals, with almost...

Drinking water for an estimated half a million Minnesotans is drawn from groundwater contaminated with elevated levels of nitrate, a toxic pollutant that is linked to cancer and is especially...

Nitrate pollution of U.S. drinking water may be responsible for up to 12,594 cases of cancer a year, at a cost of up to $1.5 billion for health care, according to a new peer-reviewed study by the...

In the summer, millions of lush green acres of corn and soybeans blanket the Midwest. Come fall, many harvesters scrape crop fields until they are black and barren, exposing large swaths of vulnerable...

The Maumee River, overloaded with fertilizer and manure, is the single largest source of the phosphorus that triggers blooms of toxic algae in Lake Erie. Over half of the manure in the Maumee River...

Although North Carolinians' attention has rightly been focused on the state's dense concentration of factory swine farms – concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, which produce 10 billion...

North Carolina's dense concentration of approximately 6,500 confined animal feeding operations, often called CAFOs, annually generate two million tons of dry chicken waste and 10 billion gallons of...