On Thursday, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway introduced a draft Farm Bill that runs counter to what farmers and eaters across the country need. Among other disappointments, the bill would eliminate the country's largest conservation program, allow concentrated animal feeding operations to claim limited conservation dollars, place no meaningful limitations on subsidy payments to large farms, and remove all mandatory funding for Energy Title programs.

Today, April 10, is Ben & Jerry’s annual Free Cone Day.

There’s only one problem: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is never free—because we all pay for the health and environmental damage caused by Ben & Jerry’s factory farm dairy practices.

OCA has been running a campaign against Ben & Jerry’s factory farm ice cream ever since we announced that the brand is contaminated with Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.

Glyphosate contamination isn’t the only problem with Ben & Jerry’s. Water pollution caused by non-organic dairy farms that supply Ben & Jerry’s is costing taxpayers millions.

Today, please help get the word out that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is never free. 

Worldwide, two-thirds of all farm animals are now inhumanely imprisoned on highly-polluting factory farms, fed pesticide- and chemical-contaminated grains and GMOs, often supplemented with contaminated fish meal and oils, and routinely dosed with antibiotics and hormones.

What a lot of consumers may not understand however, is that most of the fish sold in grocery stores and served up in restaurants today in industrialized nations is also factory-farmed. 

Factory-farmed salmon and fish not only threaten wild salmon and other marine species by spreading disease (and now GMO-related risks ), but also by contaminating coastal waters and the ocean with the toxic chemicals and feed used on fish farms.

Salmon and other fish farms also pose a major threat to human health. In fact, according to Mercola.com, farmed salmon are perhaps the most toxic food that Americans consume.

Whether it’s the animal waste and antibiotics from livestock operations, or the nitrates and pesticides from GMO corn and soy grown to feed the millions of confined animals, from sea to shining sea, industrial agribusiness, led by multi-billion dollar corporations like Tyson, is destroying our most precious natural resource—water.

State and federal regulators by and large use their power to protect corporate profits, not public health.

That leaves citizens to battle it out in the courts. But now some members of Congress want to eliminate even that last resort.

What can you do? To help speed the transition to an agriculture model that heals our waterways, rather than exploit and pollute them?