The White House garden may be green and unsullied by agricultural chemicals, but Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) just forked over $180,000 to fund an agribusiness-backed smear campaign against the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) “Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides,” which includes the “Dirty Dozen,” a list of the foods most commonly found to have pesticide residue.

In July, a website called SafeFruitsandVeggies.com was launched with the sole purpose of debunking the EWG’s guide. The website, with the headline, “The Real Dangers of the Dirty Dozen List,” was started by the Alliance for Food and Farming, a California-based group that bills itself as a non-profit organization made up of farmers and farm groups who want to “communicate their commitment to food safety and care for the land.”

The agriculture department is paying an industry group to raise questions about its own data. It’s more than a little baffling.