Over the weekend, the second most heavily subsidized farmer in Congress -- and one of the largest subsidy recipients in Tennessee history -- said Washington should not "steal" from taxpayers to support food assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- better known as food...

A day after the Senate Agriculture committee passed its version of the 2013 farm bill, the House committee did the same. The Senate wrongly trimmed nutrition and conservation programs while boosting crop insurance subsidies. The House version, voted out of committee late Wednesday night, supercharged these cuts by chopping a...

Minnesota Congressman Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) struck a nerve this month when he said that "there is five times as much fraud" in the federal crop insurance program as there is the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.

"There is less fraud in food stamps than in any government program," Peterson

Ken Burns, America's premiere documentarian, has tackled topics from jazz to the Civil War. His new film chronicles the Dust Bowl, the massive ecological disaster that plagued a large swath of U. S. farmland during the 1930's.

Misguided farming practices at the heart of the disaster

The...

The Food and Environmental Reporting Network released a striking report this week (Sept. 18) describing how industrial agriculture and climate change are fueling massive blooms of toxic algae:

Blooms have closed lake beaches or led to swimming advisories from Vermont's Lake Champlain to Dorena Reservoir in Oregon and...

In the face of crippling drought across the Corn Belt, Congress is considering funding a disaster aid package with cuts to climate friendly conservation programs.

Even as extreme drought wreaks havoc on crops and communities across the Midwest, government officials are now confident that they can link recent...

One of the big challenges facing the globe in the next century will be access to clean water.

In America, federal agriculture policies are putting drinking water used by millions of people at risk. Perverse incentives such as farm subsidies and ethanol mandates have ushered in an era of fencerow-to-fencerow...

Will critics of food stamp recipients exhibit the same outrage if they learned that cotton farmers shared a $46 million jackpot and still receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies for years after?

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Critics of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (previously known as food...

Climate Change activists should be concerned about proposed cuts to farm bill conservation programs, which would be the carbon emissions equivalent of adding 2 million cars a year to America's roads.

As a possible 2012 farm bill looms, the ag committee leaders and their industrial agriculture lobby remoras are...

Bad federal policy and intensifying storms are washing away the rich dark soils in the Midwest that made this country an agricultural powerhouse and that remain the essential foundation of a healthy and sustainable food system in the future.

That's the alarming finding of a new Environmental Working Group report...

That some members of Congress are farmers is hardly new. Many of the Founding Fathers worked the land. But as the industrial age transformed America's agrarian society and technology made it possible for fewer farmers to grow more crops on more land, the number of lawmakers actively engaged in agriculture...

America is emerging from a financial calamity that claimed millions of jobs. Hundreds of thousands of families struggle every day just to feed their kids. The tenuous economy has increased pressure on the government to reduce spending and rein in the mounting federal deficit. But not everyone is feeling the...

From time-to-time at the Environmental Working Group, we'll be looking at the follies, excesses and outright distortions spouted by agribusiness and its PR and lobby arms. Their goal seems to be to keep consumers in the dark about what's in the food they eat, to fight needed reforms that would...

Just two years ago, Democratic political strategists defended passage of a status-quo farm subsidy bill by claiming it was essential to the survival of freshmen members from farm districts and to the party's continued control of the House.

But after Tuesday's devastating losses, most of those marginal seats are in...

The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF), a California trade association, wants you to have less information about pesticide residues on the fruits and vegetables you buy. That's not too surprising; since the Alliance represents more than 50 large produce growers and marketers and the suppliers who sell...

The battle has already begun over the direction of America's broken food and farm policy and how to shape it in the next farm bill.

The large, industrial growers of corn floated a trial balloon recently (July 20) in an attempt to justify continued taxpayer subsidies that...

The conflagration that embroiled the US Department of Agriculture last week (July 19) over the knee-jerk dismissal of an African American official who was falsely accused of reverse discrimination is only the latest travesty at an agency that has a notorious record on racial issues.

The department abruptly ousted...

Americans are sold on organics.

Over the past decade, organic produce sales have soared from 3 percent of the retail produce market in the U.S. in 2000 to nearly 11 percent last year, to $9.5 billion. According to surveys by the Organic Trade Association, organic produce's precipitous trajectory barely...

Last week began with a front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 5) detailing the links between increased fertilizer run-off due to corn ethanol production in the Mississippi River Basin to the swelling Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize...

Between 2005 and 2009, U.S. taxpayers spent a whopping $17 billion to subsidize corn-ethanol blends in gasoline. What did they get in return?

A reduction in overall oil consumption equal to an unimpressive 1.1 mile-per-gallon increase in fleet-wide fuel economy. Worse, ethanol's much ballyhooed contribution to reducing America's dependence on...