EWG has been on record supporting disaster aid for farmers hit hard by bad weather since 2005. As we put it last year:

EWG supports reasonable disaster aid for farmers and ranchers with proven, weather-related losses, unless provision of that assistance entails offsetting cuts to conservation, nutrition, rural development or other non-commodity program funds that have been slashed by Congress repeatedly for years.

The bad weather hits don't come much harder than the freeze that has decimated California's citrus growers, and producers of other crops. They, and the farm workers suddenly frozen out of work, deserve help, too.

As the Farm Subsidy Database makes clear, California farmers don't often collect disaster aid, because the weather tends to be good and the crops are irrigated. So California, the #1 agricultural state in the nation by far, ranks 8th in disaster aid between 1995-2005. Of course, the higher value crops grown there also usually mean higher disaster payments when they are made. That's a very different situation than we see with farmers and ranchers in the perennially dry Great Plains, some of whom receive disaster assistance every other year, if not more frequently. That pattern of aid over the past two decades looks like this:

(We did find 35 "chronic recipients" of farm disaster aid in California--recipients who collected disaster payments 11 years or more out of 21.)

EWG will issue a statement Monday encouraging an aggressive USDA response to the California disaster with resources already available to the department. And we'll make the case to Congress to consider aid to frost-bitten California growers as part of any disaster aid package this year.

We continue to oppose a "subsidy bonus" to compensate subsidy crop farmers, and no one else, for increased energy costs. And we continue to stress this point:

Agricultural disaster aid should be thought of as serving two distinct groups of farmers and ranchers. The vast majority rarely receives disaster checks from taxpayers, and the amount of assistance is modest. The second group, the primary source of the political pressure for disaster aid every year, is a small minority of its recipients, but they are chronically dependent on disaster aid and over two decades have collected it every other year.

As I noted in an earlier post, adding "permanent disaster aid" authority to the farm bill raises a whole other set of questions, principal among them cost. Philip Brasher made some of those same points in Sunday's Des Moines Register:

The views of Iowa's farmers will be important, because the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee is Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. He hasn't taken a position on the issue yet, but he makes clear that he is concerned a new disaster program could take money from other priorities. Biofuels, conservation and nutrition programs are a few that he names.

Harkin is still stinging from a decision by Congress to slash a conservation program he authored to pay for disaster aid in 2004.

"We cannot again take funds out of other agriculture programs to pay for disaster assistance," he said.