Research

Water that runs off fields treated with chemical fertilizers and manure is loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus, two potent pollutants that inevitably end up in rivers and lakes and set off a cascade...

As a Congressional “Super Committee” presses to meet its Nov. 23 deadline to come up with a deficit reduction proposal, powerful farm state legislators and agricultural industry lobbyists have moved...

View and Download the report here: Giving it Away Free A simple, free program to insure farmers against actual crop losses at full market price would be cheaper and fairer than today's hopelessly...

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.

Direct payment farm subsidies are in the budget crosshairs and may at long last be eliminated as Congress works to reduce the federal deficit. These long-discredited subsidies send checks out year...

When it comes to the massive amounts of nitrogen floating down the Mississippi River, lobbyists for the National Corn Growers Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation love to point fingers...

Sorting out the details of USDA's farm subsidy data and Congressional disclosure forms is a difficult process. Records don't always match up; details appear one place but not another. And USDA, taking...

Year after year, vast amounts of pollutants pour into Chesapeake Bay, fouling the largest estuary in the United States and ultimately creating large dead zones in waters that once teemed with life...

Thanks to five decades of bad policy decisions, a quirk of geology underlaying hundreds of thousands of acres of California's Central Valley has snowballed into a multi-million dollar taxpayer...

Although cotton and rice constitute a tiny portion of California's nation-leading farm production, those two crops – rather than the state's vast harvest of fruits and vegetables – continue to get the...

Farm industry leaders and their supporters in Congress are trying to derail climate change legislation by insisting that the House-passed bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), will...

Climate change presents California agriculture with two major challenges: how to reduce its contribution to climate change while arming itself against the threats a warming planet poses to...

Without an ambitious effort to fairly but effectively regulate pollution coming from farm fields throughout the watershed, there is simply no chance that the Chesapeake Bay will recover. The time has...

The Mississippi River flows more than 2,000 miles from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico and is the world's third-largest river basin. Millions of residents get their drinking water from the Mississippi...

When Congress passed the 2008 farm bill on June 18, 2008, it promised to increase funding for the most important and popular program in farm country to prevent water pollution and tackle other...

Behind the thin green gloss Congressional leaders spread across the subsidy-laden 2008 farm bill, key Democratic lawmakers are hacking away at promises to expand conservation and other environmental...

The Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates a dramatic increase in the use of biofuels in transportation. The RFS mandates significant increases in...

Due to lax standards and implementation problems, the conservation compliance program is missing cost-effective opportunities to make further, substantial reductions in soil erosion on U.S. cropland.

Black farmers receive between one-third to one-sixth of the benefits under major federal crop subsidy programs that other farmers receive, and the “subsidy gap” has widened over the past decade. The...

Every year, the Central Valley Project (CVP) 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...

A new Environmental Working Group analysis identifies and posts online more than 1.2 million prospective recipients of a proposed $1.5 billion crop subsidy bonus contained in HR 4939, The Emergency...

It is one of the toughest environmental problems facing America. For over 20 years, scientists have documented the appearance of a summertime "Dead Zone" that all but obliterates marine life in what...

Courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, a few hundred farms in Fresno and Kings counties annually get enough water to supply every household in Los Angeles, at pennies on the dollar of the price paid by urban...

Some of America's richest agribusinesses are double dipping from U.S. taxpayers' pockets at a rate of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) computer...