On Friday, July 29, Dr. Charles Benbrook took the stand, the last witness to testify on behalf of the plaintiff in the trial of Dewayne Johnson vs. Monsanto Co.

Benbrook is an agricultural and toxicology scientist, a Harvard graduate and former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2000, he has studied the link between glyphosate, the key active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the type of cancer Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a former school groundskeeper who was required to use Roundup, now has.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been providing OCA with first-hand accounts of the trial, reported that Benbrook told the jury that Monsanto had repeatedly killed internal company studies suggesting that Roundup is carcinogenic. And when a study mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed clear evidence of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity, the company bullied and bamboozled the EPA to withdraw it.

Benbrook also testified that our Monsanto-friendly EPA’s focus on glyphosate alone is a sham, intended to gloss over the more important question of “whether the Roundup formulation itself, not just a single ingredient, is toxic and carcinogenic.” He told the court that Monsanto uses a potent surfactant that dramatically amplifies Roundup’s toxicity.

Read ‘Plaintiff’s Final Live Witness Testifies in Monsanto Trial’

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Attorney Peter C. Wright is a lawyer who has spent his entire career helping Monsanto and Dow avoid cleaning up their toxic pollution.

According to the New York Times, Wright, who spent 19 years at Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical makers, once described himself in a court deposition as “the company’s dioxin lawyer.”

Now, Trump wants to put Wright in charge of—guess what?—forcing companies like Monsanto and Dow to clean up their toxic pollution.

Wright has a long history of being on the wrong side of the chemical safety debate. One of his favorite defense strategies is to argue that dioxin, a known carcinogen and Monsanto and Dow pollutant, isn’t really as bad as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) makes it out to be—even though scientists place dioxin (which often ends up in our food) “among the most toxic chemicals known to man.”

We have just two words: Fox. Henhouse.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your Senators: Don’t Put a DowDupont Lawyer in Charge of Cleaning up Dow’s Toxic Waste Dumps!

Should a few elected officials in one town have the power to approve huge corporate-owned factory farms whose environmental impact will be felt by an entire region or state?

Maybe not. But they often do. And it’s one more example of why local elections matter.

Local officials in the town of Fremont, Nebraska, population 26,500, are in favor of letting Costco build the biggest chicken factory farm operation in the U.S. Costco’s project will be disastrous for Nebraska waterways, and for all those Nebraskans who depend on clean water.

And then there’s the toxic and foul air neighbors living near the 100 chicken barns sprinkled throughout the state will be forced to smell and inhale.

In the seaside town of Belfast, Maine, population 6,668, town officials are enthusiastically behind plans by Norway-based Nordic Aquafarms to tear up 40 acres of forest in order to build a $550-million land-based salmon factory farm—even though the company can’t provide a straight answer as to how much of the region’s water it will suck up for its operations, or what it will feed the fish. Most feed for factory farm fish creates foul waste (which has to end up somewhere), not to mention producing a toxic factory farm food for humans.

OCA is working behind the scenes to provide support, including legal advice, to the citizens in Fremont and Belfast who are standing up for the right to a clean environment and strong, healthy, local food economy.

But make no mistake—it’s not easy to challenge local elected officials who get all starry-eyed when giant corporations come in with big promises and big lies. That’s why our 501(c)(4) lobbying arm, Citizens Regeneration Lobby, is working to identify strong local candidates and to encourage people like you to support them.

We can do this. But we’ll have to work together. Work hard. And work fast.

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Things are heating up in Nebraska, where Costco wants to build what would be the largest poultry factory farm operation in the U.S.—a project that would include about 100 poultry barns sprinkled throughout the state (and possibly even in Iowa).

This week, citizens and communities opposed to Costco’s foul project called on planning board members to deny permits for four proposed poultry barns in Lancaster County, just south of Lincoln.

Costco’s proposed processing plant, which would be based in Fremont, Nebraska, plans to slaughter 85 million chickens annually—or about 1.7 million per week. That’s a lot of chicken, not to mention a lot of water pollution in a state whose waterways are already impaired, thanks to industrial agriculture.

Costco will argue, just as Tyson, Cargill, Sanderson Farms and other corporations argue, that we need all that “cheap chicken” to “feed the world.”

Not true. The Wall Street Journal reports that there’s a record glut of meat in the U.S. In fact, American meat producers now have 2.5 billion pounds of chicken, turkey, pork and beef languishing in cold storage warehouses.

We’re guessing that none of these companies, including Costco, have plans to ship this excess meat to people too destitute to pay for it, either here in the U.S., or anywhere else in the world.

You can help Nebraskans fight the good fight against Costco’s Big Chicken plans—by letting Costco know that you don’t want more factory farms, or more factory farm chicken.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Costco: Consumers Don’t Want Your Giant Factory Farm!

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One of the primary responsibilities of parents is to protect their kids. But how do you protect your child from pesticide exposure, when nearly 77 percent of all foods contain pesticide residues?

In his new book, “Poisoning Our Children: The Parents’ Guide to the Myths of Safe Pesticides,” André Leu challenges the chemical agriculture industry’s assertion that “when used as directed,” pesticides, herbicides and insecticides are “safe.”

Leu, who is international director of Regeneration International, outlines research that not only contradicts industry claims of safety, but also reveals how exposure to toxic chemicals is even more dangerous for kids than it is for adults.

In a 2014 interview with Dr. Mercola, Leu says:

“Children, when we talk about the unborn, the newborn and grown children up to puberty, they do not have the detoxification enzymes in their livers that we have as adults. Particularly for young children, that means they have no way of detoxifying even the smallest amount of a pesticide or a chemical.”

According to Leu, scientists report that when children are exposed to even small amounts of pesticides—either in the womb, through breastfeeding or as a toddler eating food—their nervous, endocrine and reproductive systems can be negatively affected.

Read (and watch the video) ‘Poisoning Our Children: The Parent’s Guide to the Myths of Safe Pesticides’