ANNUAL REPORT 2025
POWER OF PERSISTENCE
Protecting Endangered Species & Pollinators From Toxic Pesticides
Shutting Down Animal Factories: Land
Shutting Down Animal Factories: Water
A MESSAGE FROM OUR CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS
For more than twenty-five years, Center for Food Safety (CFS) has been on the front lines of a fight that defines our future. From the rise of genetical-ly engineered (GE) monoculture crops and the massive increase in toxic pesticides they created, to the pollution of our land and waters by animal factory farms, we have never wavered in our mission: to protect people and the planet from the harms of industrial agriculture. Our persistence has protected farmers and farmworkers, pollinators and endangered species, mothers and children, animals both wild and farmed, and the native ecosystems and earth systems that sustain us all.
Today, that persistence matters more than ever. In a time of profound political uncertainty and an alarming assault on science, environmental protections, and the rule of law, our resolve has only grown stronger. Big Ag’s influence has crept deeper into agencies meant to defend the public good. But while the political landscape grows darker, we continue to find light—and justice—in the courts. That is where we are holding the line, issue by issue, case by case, to protect our and our children’s right to a sustainable and just food system.
Your support fuels this resistance. Every legal challenge, every victory, every act of courage is made possible by people like you who refuse to surrender our food, our health, or our planet to corporate greed. Thanks to your steadfast support, CFS remains a force that cannot be silenced or sidelined. And we will keep pushing forward, watchdogging the current administration, going to court, and educating stakeholders and the public to build a powerful grassroots movement; to build a better future for our food and safeguard our food and environment for generations to come. In the pursuit of an equitable, humane, and just food system, persistence is not just a virtue; it is a lifeline for democracy, health, and the Earth itself.
KEY: Between two dates (ex: 2006-2012)
Date of event
First-ever litigation challenging GE crop experiments (Alliance for BioIntegrity v. Shalala)
Successfully kept GMOs, irradiation, and sewage sludge from being allowed in the first federal organic regulations
First-ever legal challenge on failure to regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions for climate change effects
Publication of Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
First-ever legal challenges to nano materials in food/other consumer products
legal challenge to use GE crops on wildlife refuges
Litigated first-ever U.S. Supreme Court case on GMO regulation
First-ever legal challenge to GE animal (glofish)
Publication of Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food
Legal challenges to USDA field testing and commercialization
GE crops that led to courts recognition of transgenic contamina tion as a cognizable environmental and socioeconomic harm
TIMELINE
litigation holding government accountable to protection for Monarch butterflies under the Endangered Species Act
Cases enforcing Food Safety Modernization Act securing food safety regulations that protect public health
Defended community rights to ban pesticide use in their localities and consumer right to know what’s in their food (Hawaii cases, Vermont GE labeling)
first-ever “Ag Gag” lawsuit protecting constitutional right to record/ show inhumane and unsanitary conditions of animal factories
stopped Monsanto’s toxic dicamba spraying after years of litigation
Successfully challenged EPA approval of bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor
Court holds EPA’s cancer safety finding for Roundup/glyphosate unlawful and strikes it down
GE labeling win striking down federal labeling scheme that uses QR code instead of clear language
Aquaculture victory overturning plan to permit industrial aquaculture in the Pacific Ocean Court victory overturning Trump administration rule that would have made GMOs unregulated Dicamba second court win halting spraying again over millions of acres
Overturning approval of what would have been the largest chicken factory farm in Oregon
commercialization of contaminaharm
Secured nationwide ban prohibiting GE crops and neonicotinoids in national wildlife refuges after 10-year litigation campaign
First-ever successful challenge to mega-factory farm for nitrate groundwater contamination as hazardous waste
GE salmon, what would have been first-ever GE food animal, held unlawful and blocked from entering the marketplace, leading to eventual bankruptcy
Successfully defended in court local communities’ rights to create GMO-free seed sanctuaries (Jackson county Oregon case)
first-of-its-kind aquaculture victory preventing offshore industrial fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico
legal settlement resulted in removal of a dozen neonic insecticide products to protect bees and requiring EPA to assess their harm to endangered species for the first time
Finalized settlement that forced EPA to assess endocrine disrupting risks of pesticides for firsttime ever
Through successful litigation secured humane animal welfare standards in organic food
passed SB 85 in Oregon protecting local communities from animal factories
filed first-ever petition challenging EPA’s lack of assessment of PFAS pesticides
Secured public’s right to know what’s in their food with major court victory overturning USDA’s deficient GE labeling law that hid GMOs behind QR codes and exempted ultra-processed foods.
FOR MORE THAN 25 YEARS...
THAN
Our pioneering legal, policy, and campaign strategies have led a grassroots revolution to transform our food system—curbing the use of toxic pesticides and GMOs in agriculture and promoting an organic, ecological, and just food and farming system.
75%
of our cases —
high-stakes, against-the-odds, precedent-setting lawsuits against Monsanto, Big Ag, and federal and state regulators failing to do their jobs—to protect public health and endangered species from pesticides like cancer-causing Roundup, drift-prone dicamba, bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides, endocrine-disrupting atrazine, to name a few.
We’ve stopped GMO wheat, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, trees, grass, and fish. We’ve won GMO labeling fights to ensure we all know what’s in our food and challenged misleading labels. We’ve protected organic standards from pesticides and GMOs, and succeeded in ensuring humane animal welfare is required for organic certification. We’ve shut down polluting mega-factory farms from Hawai‘i to Washington to New York. And because of our litigation, over 270,000 miles of U.S. ocean waters remain free of industrial fish farms.
EFFECTS OF GMO
SPECIES
HEALTH
CLIMATE CRISIS
EXTINCTION CRISIS
PANDEMIC RISKS
SOIL HEALTH
MONOCULTURE
GMO/ PESTICIDES
AND HOW THEY CONTRIBUTE
GMO/ PESTICIDES
FARMWORKER HEALTH
AND PESTICIDES
SUPERWEEDS & SUPERBUGS
HUMAN HEALTH
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
COLONIALISM
HUMAN RIGHTS
REPRODUCTIVE/ CHILDRENS’ HEALTH
RIGHT TO GROW/CHOOSE
CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL ISSUES
IN 2025
• We prevented spraying of Monsanto’s dicamba herbicide, a volatile toxin that has caused widespread harms to the environment. We have now twice overturned its approvals and prevented tens of millions of acres and millions of pounds of dicamba from being sprayed, in 2024 and again in 2025.
• Secured public’s right to know what’s in their food with major court victory overturning USDA’s deficient GE labeling law that hid GMOs behind QR codes and exempted ultra-processed foods.
• Overturned a Trump administration rule change that would have made GMOs completely unregulated
• Set new legal precedents that shift the law in a more protective direction for all future pesticides decisions, enshrining environmental and socioeconomic harms that EPA cannot ignore.
For decades, allies in al movement to defeating down the victory make them
HALTING MONOCULTURE TREADMILL
decades, Center for Food Safety has been one of our closest and most trusted in the fight for a just and sustainable food system. Together, we’ve led the nationmovement to stop GMOs—from challenging genetically engineered crops in the fields defeating GE salmon once and for all. Most recently, we stood side by side to strike the Trump administration’s unlawful Part 340 GMO regulations, a major for transparency and public oversight. CFS’s legal persistence, and courage them an indispensable force for environmental justice.
Dana Perls, Senior Food & Agriculture Program Manager, Friends of the Earth
HALTING THE GE MONOCULTURE PESTICIDETREADMILL PARADIGM
IN 2025 PROTECTING ENDANGERED POLLINATORS FROM TOXIC
• We continue to push the federal government to finalize legal protection for the iconic Monarch butterfly and the Iowa skipper butterfly, whose population declines have been primarily caused by Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GE crop systems.
• We launched a major public awareness and comment campaign that drove hundreds of thousands of individual comments and dozens of organizations and businesses in support of Monarchs’ protection.
• And in October 2025, after a year of inaction from the federal government on our legal petition to protect the Iowa Skipper butterfly, we launched a lawsuit to demand a response from the government.
• We challenged FWS’s biological opinion for malathion, a widely used organophosphate insecticide known to cause significant adverse impacts to human health and the environment, and is a severe threat to terrestrial invertebrates including butterflies and bees. We will continue our work in this precedent-setting litigation in 2026.
ENDANGERED SPECIES & TOXIC PESTICIDES
Center for Food Safety is one of our closest partners in our efforts to protect endangered plants and animals from the threats posed by herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. For example, have fought together for over a decade to get Endangered Species Act protections for monarch butterflies, whose populations have plummeted in large part because of widespread pesticide use. CFS’s work has included battling the herbicide glyphosate, which is a potent killer of milkweed, the sole host plant for monarch larvae, and also taking on neonicotinoid insecticides and their excessive use as seed coatings. Center for Food Safety has taken on the biggest and most important battles. We are so grateful for their tremendous work in this space and for the opportunity to support one another’s work.
Lori Anne Environmental Health Program Director & Senior Attorney, Center for Biological Diversity
On pollinators and species protection, we will persist in our strategic litigation to close the pesticide-coated seed loophole allowing seeds coated with pollinator-killing pesticides to be planted without regulatory oversight. We will also be in court fighting for legal protection for imperiled butterflies under the Endangered Species Act. And in 2026 we will also have a major opportunity to address directly pesticides’ role in the extinction crisis, as the EPA is required by law to complete its periodic review of approved pesticides including glyphosate, bee-killing neonicotinoids, atrazine, and more.
SHUTTING DOWN ANIMAL FACTORIES:
The JS Ranch victory was a powerful reminder of what communities can achieve when we stand together. Thanks to Center for Food Safety’s legal expertise and deep partnership with local advocates, we stopped a massive factory chicken farm from polluting our river, threatening salmon habitat, and endangering rural livelihoods.
CFS never gave up—they listened to us, believed in our fight, and brought the science and legal power we needed to win. This case wasn’t just about one permit; it was about protecting the health, dignity, and future of our community and the land we call home.
Kendra Kimbirauskas, Founder Farmers Against Foster Farms
LAND
This year CFS successfully stopped what would have been the largest chicken CAFO in Oregon state history from being permitted and constructed.
But for our lawsuits, JS Ranch would have otherwise raised and then slaughtered 3.5 million chickens in crowded warehouses without any outside access. The factory farm would have also polluted the nearby Santiam River, home to endangered salmon and steelhead, and the pristine and picturesque part of the Willamette Valley and nearby small organic farms.
This impact litigation strategically sister-ed with advocacy and legislation at the state level (SB 85) and at the county level that together triangulated to produce the 2025 victory. It is a powerful example of how we utilize both impact litigation alongside strategic legislative efforts and advocacy to create change. And this is just one example: We also continued legal challenges to major CAFOs and their regulation in Hawaii, Maine, Washington, and Montana.
SHUTTING DOWN ANIMAL FACTORIES: OCEAN
We also continued our vital work to prevent of the establishment of industrial fish farming in our oceans: our legal victory overturned a national permit that would have authorized aquaculture facility construction in thousands of miles of federal ocean waters around the country.
The court agreed with us that the government failed to analyze the adverse impacts on ocean ecosystems and endangered species, and struck down the challenged permit – ending any finfish aquaculture facilities construction, forcing the government and industrial aquaculture industry back to the drawing board once again.
This is the fourth major legal win Center for Food Safety has secured in a broader campaign against federal programmatic efforts to entrench ocean industrial aquaculture, starting in 2014. Other 2025 CFS aquaculture cases challenged coastal shellfish aquaculture damaging the Pacific coast ecosystems, and industrial salmon net pens polluting the Columbia River.
In 2026, we will be taking new legal enforcement actions against factory farm polluters on behalf of rural communities to protect their groundwater and their native ecosystems, while also working with our fishery and conservation partners to stop the expansion of industrial fish farms into federal waters.
CFS has been a true pioneer in the litigation space, pushing back against industrial finfish aquaculture, and often setting positive precedent while other bigger NGOs were afraid to enter the fray. Thanks to CFS’s tireless efforts, we now have two enormous wins, both with the Gulf Fishermen’s Association (2020) and Don’t Cage Our Oceans (2025) cases, that have forced industry apologists to develop even weaker and more contorted legal arguments that support their misguided vision of unchecked corporate takeover of the seafood sector. At Don’t Cage Our Oceans, we’re thrilled to have a partner in CFS, and it’s reassuring to know that future aquaculture litigation will be in good hands.
James Mitchell, Legislative Director, Don’t Cage Our Oceans
”
SAFEGUARDING FARMWORKER HEALTH & ORGANIC PRODUCTION
In 2025, we achieved a successful settlement in our lawsuit on behalf of farmworkers and environmental organizations challenging EPA’s failure to test and regulate dangerous endocrine-disrupting pesticides, despite being mandated by Congress to do so decades ago.
CFS represented organic stakeholders in a successful case defending USDA regulations authorizing grower group certification, which allows small landholders in Africa, South America, and Asia—who lack the resources to seek organic certification individually—to obtain organic certification as a group. Prohibition on grower groups would cause catastrophic consequences to organic stakeholders: lost livelihoods of small farmers around the world, elimination of the sourcing for companies, and loss of organic products like coffee, chocolate, and more for consumers.
FARMWORKER PRODUCTION
As a result of our pro bono representation, the courts rejected the challenge to the certification, meaning that organic growers of banana, coffee, chocolate and other crops from around the world (many in the Global South) are able to continue to sell their products in the U.S. organic market.
On behalf of our farmers, producers, and farm workers, we will hold the line and diligently watchdog, and litigate when necessary, any further rollbacks of our food standards. This includes proposed rollbacks of Organic food standards and other food safety and labeling regulations. And after our successful litigation getting EPA to finally assess endocrine-disrupting pesticide risks, we will continue to stand alongside our farming community to monitor EPA’s progress.
The National Organic Coalition can always count on Center for Food Safety when organic integrity is on the line. I’ve worked with CFS’s outstanding attorneys for more than a decade and have seen, time and again, their willingness to show up for the organic community. ensure a level playing field for farmers, and protect the livelihoods of thousands of small producers around the world.
TESTIMONIALS
CFS has devoted countless hours to defending strong standards—most notably by challenging USDA’s withdrawal of long-overdue organic animal welfare rules, and by filing an amicus brief supporting the grower-group certification model. Their advocacy has helped uphold consumer trust,
Abby Youngblood, Executive Director, National Organic Coalition
As campesinas (farmworker girls and women), we are gravely concerned about the detrimental health impacts of continued exposure to endocrine-disrupting pesticides that can cause birth defects, cancer, and the unimaginable--damage to our children's health. CFS represented our network of farmworkers and challenged EPA’s failure to test and regulate endocrine-disrupting pesticides, and forced EPA to start evaluating endocrine-disrupting pesticides. It is a victory that will have enormous impact for farmworkers across the country—and we could not have secured this win without CFS.
Mily Treviño-Sauceda, Co-Founder & Executive Director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
TESTIMONIALS
SUZANNAH SMITH KINGSLY MCCONNELL
Diehl Legal Fellow
Staff Attorney
TAYLOR IKEMIYA
Executive Coordinator
NEW
STAFF
Director of Operations and Institutional Giving
Associate Attorney
Development Manager
JAMES KNIGHT
SHENELLE SHAAM
ASHA RAMAKUMAR
ELEVATING YOUR VOICE
Across Instagram and Facebook, Center for Food Safety content reached over:
2.6+ 3.5
165,000+ million people million total views interactions this
Beyond awareness, our digital storytelling inspired action - converting 400 followers into new CFS members committed to protecting people, pollinators, and the planet.
300+ 3 groundbreaking lawsuits supreme court cases
294 clients represented free of charge
27 first-ever cases establishing cutting-edge legal precedent transforming our food system
75%+ of our legal challenges Victories in
NUMBERS CFS BY THE
856
18
million acres of wildlife refuges free from GE crops and pesticides
100’S
major pesticides revoked & declared unlawful of endangered species protected
273,296
DOZENS
ALL square miles of waters protected from Aquaculture of GMO products prevented from coming to market
GMO products are required to be labeled in the United States
LOOKING FORWARD
2025 saw the rollback of critical environmental regulations, rescission of environmental justice protections, and threats to undermine organic food production and food safety initiatives. This year also underscored that despite the intent of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, in Washington D.C. Big Ag and its lobby continues to have exorbitant power over our pesticide and food policies.
But we persist—Regardless of who sits in the White House and who has control of Congress, time and time again, we went to court to fight for the food system we deserve—and won, again and again—and we will do so again in 2026.
We are at a major inflection point for our ongoing public interest litigation: GE food labeling, next-generation GE crops and their accompanying pesticides, and pollinator and endangered species protection.
The Trump Administration has bowed to the pesticide lobby and proposed approving a barrage of new pesticide approvals with known harms to pollinators and wildlife. As we have always done, we filed detailed scientific evidence in opposition and will be ready to challenge those approvals in court in 2026. And we will build on our prior legal precedents to further strengthen regulatory oversight of GE crops and their companion pesticides in the U.S. legal regime writ large.
Together, we have achieved so much. There’s more work to be done and we could not be more excited to have the chance to create a regulatory framework that supports the just and sustainable food system that we all want and deserve.
WE PERSIST.
