Environmental Working Group

Crop supports would be set so high in the farm bill written by House Republicans that cotton, peanut, and rice growers, and probably wheat and sorghum farmers too, "would receive a payment every year," said an environmental group on Tuesday. Farm groups called for Agriculture Committee passage of the bill later this week despite questions about the financial underpinnings of the five-year legislation.

Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee proposed a $4 billion injection into the crop insurance program so that the government would pay a larger share of the premiums on policies offering the highest levels of coverage. "We need more farm in the farm bill to get it passed," said Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, the lead sponsor, on Tuesday.

Congress could achieve significant savings in the crop insurance program by reducing guaranteed payments to insurers and requiring wealthy operators to pay more for taxpayer-subsidized coverage, said the Government Accountability Office on Monday. The reforms could save billions of dollars on a program estimated to cost $101 billion over the next decade.

U.S. farm groups are giving priority to winning higher reference prices, a key factor in calculating crop subsidies, in the farm bill due this year in Congress. But the benefits would flow to a relative handful of large cotton, rice, and peanut growers, said an environmental group on Tuesday.

Hundreds of thousands of Minnesota residents are drinking water contaminated with elevated levels of nitrate, according to a new analysis from the Environmental Working Group. The state is rolling out new rules to regulate nitrogen fertilizer application and protect groundwater, but advocates say they may not go far enough to keep residents safe.

The election of Donald Trump means that environmentalists can forget about new, broader rules on land and water stewardship by farmers, said a prominent Republican farm leader. "Those new regulations are not going to happen," said Chuck Conner, who added that the 2018 farm bill would continue the system of incentives for voluntary action against erosion and polluted runoff.

A refrain among U.S. farmers and processors is that bountiful America helps feed a hungry world with a population forecast to increase by one-third, to 9.7 billion people, by mid-century. The actuality is that U.S. farm exports "go to countries that can afford to pay for them," and less than 1 percent go to the world's hungriest nations, says the Environmental Working Group.

Voluntary soil and water conservation programs "aren't leading to clean water, clean air and a healthy environment," says the Environmental Working Group in unveiling a database that tracks federal conservation spending to the county level. EWG says Congress should require farmers to perform more stewardship work in exchange for farm supports, and focus scattershot conservation programs on the practices with the greatest payoff in the areas with the greatest need.

The second-most widely used weedkiller in the country, atrazine, poses potential chronic risk to birds, mammals and fish due to runoff and spray drift, said a draft ecological-risk assessment by the EPA. The assessment is part of a review that started in 2013 on whether to extend use of the broad-spectrum herbicide in the U.S. for 15 years.