About five miles south of Broken Bow, in the heart of central Nebraska, thousands of cattle stand in feedlots at Adams Land & Cattle Co., a supplier of beef to the meat giant Tyson Foods.

From the air, the feedlots look dusty brown and packed with cows—not a vision of happy animals grazing on open pastureland, enriching the soil with carbon. But when the animals are slaughtered, processed, and sent onward to consumers, labels on the final product can claim that they were raised in a “climate friendly” way.  

In late 2022, Tyson—one of the country’s “big four” meat packers—applied to the US Department of Agriculture, seeking a “climate friendly” label for its Brazen Beef brand. The production of Brazen Beef, the label claims, achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Soon after, the USDA approved the label.

Immediately, environmental groups questioned the claim and petitioned the agency to stop using it, citing livestock’s significant greenhouse gas emissions and the growing pile of research that documents them. These groups and journalism outlets, including Inside Climate News, have asked the agency for the data it used to support its rubber-stamping of Tyson’s label but have essentially gotten nowhere.

“There are lots of misleading claims on food, but it’s hard to imagine a claim that’s more misleading than ‘climate friendly’ beef,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It’s like putting a cancer-free label on a cigarette. There’s no worse food choice for the climate than beef.”

The USDA has since confirmed it is currently considering and has approved similar labels for more livestock companies, but would not say which ones.

On Wednesday, the EWG, a longtime watchdog of the USDA, published a new analysis, outlining its efforts over the last year to push the agency for more transparency, including asking it to provide the specific rationale for allowing Brazen Beef to carry the “climate friendly” label. Last year, the group filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking the data that Tyson supplied to the agency in support of its application, but received only a heavily redacted response. EWG also petitioned the agency to not allow climate friendly or low-carbon claims on beef.

To earn the “climate friendly” label, Tyson requires ranchers to meet the criteria of its internal “Climate-Smart Beef” program, but EWG notes that the company fails to provide information about the practices that farmers are required to adopt or about which farmers participate in the program. The only farm it has publicly identified is the Adams company in Nebraska.

A USDA spokesperson told Inside Climate News it can only rely on a third-party verification company to substantiate a label claim and could not provide the data Tyson submitted for its review.  

“Because Congress did not provide USDA with on-farm oversight authority that would enable it to verify these types of labeling claims, companies must use third-party certifying organizations to substantiate these claims,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, directing Inside Climate News to the third-party verifier or Tyson for more information. 

The third-party verification company, Where Food Comes From, did not respond to emailed questions from Inside Climate News, and Tyson did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The USDA said it is reviewing EWG’s petitions and announced in June 2023 that it’s working on strengthening the “substantiation of animal-raising claims, which includes the type of claim affixed to the Brazen Beef product.”

The agency said other livestock companies were seeking similar labels and that the agency has approved them, but would not identify those companies, saying Inside Climate News would have to seek the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“They’re being incredibly obstinate about sharing anything right now,” said Matthew Hayek, a researcher with New York University who studies the environmental and climate impacts of the food system. “Speaking as a scientist, it’s not transparent and it’s a scandal in its own right that the government can’t provide this information.”

This lack of transparency from the agency worries environmental and legal advocacy groups, especially now that billions of dollars in taxpayer funds are available for agricultural practices deemed to have benefits for the climate. The Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, appropriated nearly $20 billion for these practices; another $3.1 billion is available through a Biden-era program called the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.

The funds for the Climate-Smart Commodities program come from the agency’s Commodity Credit Corporation and are not subject to Congressional approval or oversight. 

Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the USDA, asking for details about funding to support “low carbon” beef. The agency’s response was heavily redacted and the Center is now appealing.

“The industry continues to make big claims about sequestering carbon, with no science or scale to back it up, and uses very fuzzy accounting for their methane emissions, even though cattle are the main agricultural source of domestic methane emissions,” explained Jennifer Molidor, a senior campaigner for the group, in an email to Inside Climate News. “Brazen Beef has used a third party auditor, but it’s not clear what baseline and metrics they are using either.”

“If the USDA wants climate-smart agriculture, propping up the beef industry isn’t the smartest way to go about it,” Molidor added.

On its website, Tyson claims to reach its 10 percent greenhouse gas reduction through improved grazing methods and practices that reduce emissions from growing feed. But it does not publish the data and it says farmers can “customize their practices depending on their unique geographic location and circumstances.”

The company also says it worked with two environmental advocacy groups, the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy, to develop its carbon accounting methodology. 

Katie Anderson, a senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the organization’s role in Tyson’s Climate Smart Beef program was limited to sharing its method for measuring nitrogen, the major component of fertilizer used to grow livestock feed. When nitrogen-based fertilizer is applied to farm fields, much of it is lost to the air as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

The organization’s method calculates nitrous oxide emissions across watersheds or “entire sourcing regions,” making it less cumbersome for individual farms to calculate. “The models make it easier and more accurate for food and agriculture companies to report progress toward the nitrogen-related parts of their climate and water quality goals for their direct operations and supply chains,” Anderson said.   

Tyson did not pay the group for its contribution.

The Nature Conservancy, which has received funding from Tyson for some of its conservation projects in the company’s home state of Arkansas, was paid to share some of its expertise on sustainable agriculture and translating data from farmers.

“We only shared knowledge and advice, which Tyson took into consideration when working on the model,” said Nancy Labbe, the co-director of TNC’s Regenerative Grazing Lands program, who noted that the data on Tyson’s accounting methodology would have to come from the company itself. 

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy have received funding from the USDA via the Climate-Smart Commodities program. Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa and outspoken critic of U.S. agricultural policy, said the environmental groups, universities, and corporations taking money from the USDA for climate-focused efforts should all be subject to the same rules.

“USDA should have a transparent methodology that’s applicable to everyone—the outsourcing, the monitoring, the verification—for all these groups that have incentives to make things look better than they are,” Secchi said. “There’s no transparency. How are they actually going to verify that farmers are reducing nitrogen? Are they getting GPS coordinates for tractors every day of the year? I think it’s complete bullshit. They’re only looking at select indicators, not the whole system.”i

Already, the agency has expanded its definition of “climate smart” to practices critics say are not climate smart and may actually lead to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Though it has long worked to downplay its climate impact, the livestock industry has become increasingly sensitive to growing consumer awareness of livestock’s huge carbon footprint. It has spent millions lobbying against climate action and courting academic specialists to minimize the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock. 

Last month the American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s most powerful farm lobbying group, which had long denied the science behind human-caused climate change, celebrated a drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions reported by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“America’s farmers and ranchers are leading the way in greenhouse gas emission reduction through voluntary conservation efforts and market-based incentives,” the Farm Bureau said, noting that agricultural emissions fell by 2 percent from 2021 to 2022, “ the largest decrease of any economic sector.”

But Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, noted that the drop was not the result of voluntary farm practices. High fertilizer prices, in part caused by the war in Ukraine, resulted in less fertilizer use as farmers switched to planting soybeans rather than corn, which is especially nitrogen intensive. Less corn and less fertilizer led to lower nitrous oxide emissions. Over roughly the same period, a multi-year drought killed thousands of cattle, resulting in lower methane emissions from cattle. (Cattle are the biggest source of agricultural methane, largely from their belches and from the way their manure is stored.)

“Those are the two drivers that reduced emissions,” Lilliston said. “It wasn’t anything the industry did or anything farmers did.”

“When we do reduce the number of cattle, we reduce emissions, and when we do plant other crops besides corn—crops that aren’t as fertilizer intensive—emissions go down,” Lilliston added. “This is the pathway to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The downplaying of livestock’s carbon impact isn’t just the work of the American farm and livestock lobbies. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations last year came under fire as reporters revealed that researchers had been pressured to downplay livestock’s climate impact in a landmark report. 

Last month, Hayek, of NYU, accused the FAO of misusing his data in a subsequent report that he and others say downplayed the importance of reducing beef and dairy consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which research has demonstrated is critical, especially in developing countries. 

The food system, from farm to consumer, accounts for about one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock production accounting for about two-thirds of that. It is now widely understood that emissions from the food system alone will push temperatures past the 1.5 degree Celsius target set in the Paris Agreement. Assuming the world continues to eat meat and dairy the way it does now, most of the warming projected to come from the food system will come from livestock, recent research has found.

Industry efforts to pursue “low carbon” and “climate friendly” labeling are another step toward minimizing its climate and broader environmental impacts—and they further mislead consumers, critics say. “It implies there’s a beef choice that’s good for the climate,” Faber said.

The debate over low carbon beef claims could, in theory, end up facing legal challenges. In February, the New York Attorney General’s office sued the world’s largest beef company, Brazil-based JBS, for misleading consumers by promising to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2040, even though the company clearly has a growth strategy that relies on ramping up beef production. 

“It would be difficult to achieve if not impossible,” said Peter Lehner, an attorney for Earthjustice whose work focuses on agriculture. “The measures JBS are taking are not enough and that would overlap with Tyson.”

“You can’t claim to be climate friendly or net zero because beef production ineluctably uses an enormous amount of land and emits an enormous amount of methane and nitrous oxide,” he added. “You can reduce that, but you’re still not close to a climate friendly food.”

When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands.

Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion.

In the following 17 years, the report has been scrutinized by researchers, attacked from every angle, and referenced again and again, held up as a clarion call for worldwide veganism on one side, and on the other, a symbol of the climate-hysterical global nanny state bent on stealing everyone’s cheeseburgers. 

But as the public has been whipsawed over its findings, new research says it has become increasingly clear why. Since the publication of the UN report, the livestock industry has worked strategically to unravel or downplay the report’s findings, and the findings of subsequent research that has reached similar or related conclusions.

A new study, published late last month in the journal Climatic Change, tracks the industry’s response to the report after it was published and in the ensuing years, charting how livestock, dairy, and grain companies, along with the agriculture lobby, have spent billions courting a crucial and influential voice—the academic specialist.

“Similar to fossil fuel companies, US animal agriculture companies responded to evidence that their products cause climate change by minimizing their role in the climate crisis and shaping policymaking in their favor,” the authors, Viveca Morris of Yale Law School and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of Miami write. “Here we show that the industry has done so with the help of university experts.”

The industry’s efforts, the authors argue, have helped these experts and their universities influence public opinion and craft policy in such a way that agriculture and emissions from agriculture in the US remain largely unregulated, despite their significant impact—and despite subsequent years of research demonstrating the impact of animal agriculture on the climate. They also argue that, while livestock industry funding has supported research before, funding universities’ research is uniquely influential and problematic.

At the time of the livestock report’s publication, nearly two decades ago, its message was brand new. None of the major UN climate reports had addressed livestock’s greenhouse gas emissions, and research on the climate impacts was scarce. The world had barely grasped that burning fossil fuels was altering the climate.

But in the US, home to some of the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies, the industry developed a strategy as scrutiny on their stock-in-trade intensified.

In 2009, three years after the publication of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the Beef Checkoff program, a promotional program run by the beef industry, gave $26,000 to Frank Mitloehner, then a specialist in the animal science department at the University of California, Davis, to look into the UN report, the study said.

That was the beginning of a relationship that continues to this day and has funneled millions of dollars to Mitloehner, his proteges and their universities, Morris and Jacquet write. This, they say, has helped protect the industry from regulation and reputational damage.

Mitloehner and his co-authors, Maurice Pitesky and Kimberly Stackhouse, later in 2009, issued a rebuttal of sorts in a paper published in the journal Advances in Agronomy called “Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change.” The paper said the greenhouse gas figure the U.N. report attributed to livestock—18 percent of total global emissions—was actually significantly smaller in the US. Livestock in the US, they argued, only generated about 3 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. They also noted that the 18 percent figure, which the UN report claimed was higher than emissions from the entire transportation sector, was overstated because the UN analysis included the entire life cycle of livestock emissions, but not of transportation.  

Using new models, and after pressure from the global livestock industry, including US companies, a later UN report lowered the livestock emissions figure to 14.5 percent of total global emissions.

In “Clearing the Air” the authors stressed that livestock production was projected to grow in the developing world “where food security becomes imperative,” using a frequently repeated refrain that argues people will go hungry without adequate livestock production. The paper did not acknowledge the US beef industry’s support for the research, as is customary. A press release about the report from UC Davis, titled “Don’t Blame Cows for Climate Change,” did acknowledge the industry funding.  

On that point, Mitloehner said in an interview with Inside Climate News, “There’s nothing hush-hush about this. You can’t make something more publicly known than in a press release.”

“Clearing the Air,” in turn, got a barrage of media coverage that effectively said Mitloehner and his colleagues’ work had disproven that livestock was a major contributor to greenhouse gases. The meat industry’s largest lobbying group, the North American Meat Institute, launched a “Media Myth Crusher” brief, claiming that the 18 percent figure was “widely challenged by scientists.”

In the following years, they write, the livestock industry gave millions to Mitloehner and later to Stackhouse as they launched research centers at their respective universities. In 2018 Mitloehner founded the Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness (CLEAR) Center at UC Davis to bring “clarity to the relationship of animal agriculture, the environment and our daily lives.” Over the next two years, CSU launched AgNext, to promote the livestock industry’s sustainability efforts, hiring Stackhouse-Lawson as its director.

At the time, Stackhouse-Lawson was the chief sustainability officer of JBS USA, the US arm of JBS, the world’s biggest meat company. JBS USA maintains one of the country’s largest cattle feedlots in Greeley, Colorado, and has had a long relationship with CSU, which is in nearby Fort Collins. In 2017, JBS and CSU launched a partnership with a $12.5 million grant from the company.

CSU and UC Davis provided written statements, rather than interviews with deans of the relevant departments.

“It is common for industry and government to fund programs, equipment, and even research; however, university research is independent and objective—funding sources have no influence on AgNext research outcomes,” Stackhouse-Lawson said in a prepared statement.

James Nash, a spokesman for UC Davis, sent the following statement: “UC Davis faculty adhere to the highest levels of integrity and ethical conduct. We stand by Professor Mitloehner’s research and support his efforts to work with the agricultural sector to reduce its climate and environmental footprint. The university has rigorous policies in place to enforce high ethical standards in our relationships with research partners.”

By analyzing company records with disclosures, Mitloehner’s CV, press releases, research papers, and tax documents, the authors cross-checked Mitloehner’s financial reporting. His CV says he has received nearly $5.5 million in industry funding, representing about 46 percent of his total $12 million of funding reported from 2002 to 2021. 

The study notes that some of Mitloehner’s testimony, papers, and CV don’t disclose some of the funding he received. His CV shows he received $4 million from Elanco Animal Health, but subsequent papers, from 2012 to 2023, did not acknowledge that funding.

His CV also omits funding he has received from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the cattle industry’s biggest lobbying group. Mitloehner is also listed as a director of Distributors Processing, Inc., a privately held feed additive company.

Mitloehner, in particular, became a regular speaker at industry conferences, regularly cited in the media, and increasingly popular on X (formerly Twitter) with the handle @GHGGuru—short for greenhouse gas guru. His work was cited as the livestock industry opposed a bill in Congress to require mandatory reporting under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. He became a policy advisor to the Obama White House, and wrote a white paper that persuaded the administration to drop environmental and sustainability considerations from the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines. He testified in 2019 before the Senate Agriculture Committee, saying the industry’s greenhouse gas impact “pales in comparison to other sectors.” His testimony was later repeated in industry publications. 

After “Livestock’s Long Shadow” was published, Mitloehner became chairman of the Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance Partnership (LEAP) at the UN, which was formed after discussions among industry players and with $72,000 in support from the American Feed Industry Association’s nonprofit wing, known as IFEEDER.

More recently he has advocated for a new accounting method to measure the warming impact of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, from cows, the largest source of methane in the US. This method has gained significant traction in industry publications but is debated by climate scientists.

Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami whose research has focused on lobbying and financial influence, says she first became interested in Mitloehner when he attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which included a proposal to tax emissions from cattle. After Mitloehner met with Ocasio-Cortez’s team, the proposal was dropped.

“That was the moment, for me, when I was like, ‘Wow, this guy’s having an impact’ and that he must be valuable to the industry,” Jacquet said.

Morris, the lead author on the Climatic Change study and the executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School, and Jacquet point to similarities between tobacco and fossil fuel industry strategies, particularly the fossil fuel industry’s positioning of people as experts, when they may not have expertise in a given subject. Mitloehner, they point out, is not a climate scientist.  

Mitloehner has a master’s in animal science and agricultural engineering and a Ph.D. in animal science and was recruited by UC Davis in 2002 to focus on livestock and air quality.

In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jacquet likened Mitloehner to Willie Soon, the Harvard-Smithsonian scientist who described his research as “deliverables” for the fossil fuel industry.

“The industry can create experts,” Jacquet said, adding that Mitloehner is “not a climate expert—the industry makes him into one.”

Mitloehner is getting accustomed to the critiques of his financial ties but is particularly incensed with the Climatic Change study, questioning how it passed a rigorous peer review process, and said it doesn’t address the substance of his work.

He noted, in an interview, that it’s in his job description to work with the industry to help it lower emissions. 

“There’s nothing fishy about me working with animal agriculture. In fact, it’s my charge—it’s in my job description,” he said. “I’m known for being an expert in how to quantify and mitigate emissions.”

Mitloehner noted that he has authored 130 publications and that the “validity of those publications isn’t challenged in the recent study.”

He said that, while he may not be a climatologist, he is a specialist in animal agriculture’s impact on air quality.

“I work on greenhouse gas emissions, and more importantly, on quantifying those from animal agriculture,” he said. “If you work on reducing emissions from animal agriculture, your stakeholders are people in animal agriculture. The technologies and approaches that we use are provided by companies that come from animal agriculture. Those are the companies that provide the technologies to reduce emissions.”

Mitloehner explained that about 70 percent of the university-based agricultural research comes from private industry. “In my case, it’s about half,” he said, referring to the $5.5 million. “There’s nothing unusual about that.”

He noted that farmers across Europe are taking to the streets because they feel their governments are foisting climate-related measures on them that they believe will cost them money. Mitloehner says he has their ear and they trust him.

“I’m one of the few people who can explain to them how to do these things,” he said. “They’re saying I’m too close to agriculture. That, to me, is very counterproductive.”

Anyone feeling compelled to look into a bill passed recently by the House of Representatives will see some familiar language.

It may seem wonky—the concern of agriculture or climate policy geeks. But the language relates to one of the country’s biggest sources of an especially powerful climate-warming greenhouse gas: methane from cows. And right now, reducing methane is the world’s best, most expedient strategy for quickly staving off atmospheric calamity. 

Written into a must-pass spending bill the House approved in November, the provision prevents the government from funding a law that requires big livestock farms to report how much methane their operations emit. Every spending bill Congress has passed in the last 14 years has contained similar disabling language.

In effect, while Congress has said it wants big farms to report some of their methane emissions, it has also said it won’t give regulators money to do that.  

At the recent United Nations climate summit in Dubai, more than 150 countries pledged, albeit voluntarily, to cut emissions from their agriculture and food systems, including from livestock, and six of the world’s largest dairy companies announced they would begin reporting their methane emissions publically. 

Reporting will be critical to cutting global methane emissions, because, advocates argue, you can’t reduce what you don’t measure.  

Agriculture, largely livestock production, accounts for about 37 percent of global methane emissions. In the United States, agriculture accounts for roughly 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. About 25 percent of that comes from cow burps that release methane, another 10 percent or so from the methane generated by livestock manure, and about 50 percent from nitrous oxide emitted when fertilizers are applied to crops. Corn, the nation’s largest crop, is especially fertilizer-intensive; about 40 percent of the crop grown by US farmers is fed to livestock. 

The livestock industry points out that cattle produce only about 3 or 4 percent of the US’s greenhouse gas emissions. But that percentage still adds up to the overall greenhouse gasses emitted by some countries, critics counter. (According to the EPA, emissions from cow burps and manure in the U.S. produced 278 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021. By comparison, the entire country of Spain produced 289 million metric tons that same year.)

While methane emissions from other sectors of the American economy are going down, methane from livestock, particularly manure, is going up. Emissions from manure have climbed more than 60 percent between 1990 and 2021.  

An Inside Climate News analysis of the EPA’s Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions found that, in 2020, cows emitted more than twice as much methane from their burps and manure as all of the country’s oil and gas wells. 

Yet in the United States, the world’s biggest producer of beef cattle, the second-biggest producer of milk, and third third-biggest producer of pork, regulatory agencies don’t measure livestock methane very well, or in some cases at all, critics say.

To estimate emissions from large livestock facilities, the EPA’s inventory relies on data from states, which is often incomplete.  

“We do have emissions estimating methodologies, which you can use if you know the number of animals and which manure management strategy is being used,” said Chloe Waterman, a senior program manager at the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth. “But we don’t even know how many animals are on these farms.”

In 2007, California’s Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, attempted to address one of the knowledge gaps by securing $3.5 million for the EPA to establish a greenhouse gas registry for “all sectors” of the economy. The push by these and other Democratic senators began in the same year that the Supreme Court decided the EPA was legally required to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

With the funding, the EPA ultimately launched the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program in 2009. The program—distinct from the agency’s emissions inventory—was intended to obtain data from individual sources of greenhouse gas emissions, at the “facility level,” that emitted more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gasses a year. About 13,000 facilities, including somewhere between 50 to 100 large livestock facilities, would be covered under the law.

Despite the fact that cow belches—or enteric emissions—are the biggest source of methane from livestock, the EPA did not include these emissions in its original or finalized proposal for the program, saying that “practical reporting methods to estimate facility-level emissions for these sources can be difficult to implement and can yield uncertain results.” The program only required facilities to report emissions from their manure management systems.

At the time, the farm lobby was expressing its alarm about a perceived EPA proposal to tax methane from cows and was waging a campaign to ensure that Congress didn’t “tax cow farts.” (The EPA had discussed livestock regulations in a technical report, but never proposed taxing livestock emissions.) Congress was also working to craft legislation that would create a mandatory cap-and-trade system to reduce the country’s emissions, which the farm lobby ultimately worked to defeat.

“We heard a lot of ruckus about a cow tax,” Lovera said. “It was the end-of-days, a full-court press. In this anti-regulatory culture war, the various commodity groups are incredibly good at narratives, and this is a really classic example.”

The already regulation-wary agriculture industry, which had successfully avoided most environmental rules thus far, saw the reporting program as another attempt at regulation.

“Once we’re reporting our emissions, is the next step that we will be regulated?” said Jonathan Banks, a senior climate policy advisor at the Clean Air Task Force. “I think that was the fear within the agriculture sector.”

Even though only a small number of facilities would fall under the reporting program and enteric emissions weren’t included, farm-state lawmakers ensured that the reporting requirements would never touch farm country anyway. The American Farm Bureau Federation called the reporting requirements “elaborate and burdensome” and expressed concern that reporting would be a precursor to regulation.

In anticipation of the reporting program, US Rep. Tom Latham, a Republican from Iowa, introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill in the spring of 2009 that said no funds approved by Congress could be allowed to pay for any provision “if that provision requires mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emission from manure management systems.”  

“It will do nothing to improve the environmental health of rural America,” Latham said on the House floor that year.

The language made it into the year’s final budget bill and has been included every year since. In 2022, after Democrats stripped the language from the bill, Republicans successfully negotiated the provision back in.

The National Pork Producers Council celebrated the success of Latham’s amendment, saying in its annual report that it backed “a measure that stops EPA from implementing in fiscal 2010 any provision requiring livestock operations to report greenhouse gas emissions from manure management systems.” Lathan received more campaign money from agriculture than any other sector that year. 

Iowa is, by far, the largest hog-producing state in the country, and while hogs don’t generate enteric emissions, the confinement facilities they’re raised in have massive lagoons and waste systems that generate large amounts of methane.

More recently, Sen. Joni Ernst, also a Republican from Iowa, and Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, introduced a bill that would prevent any funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s sweeping climate-focused bill, to be used to monitor methane from livestock.

The annual and occasional legislative efforts to block the EPA from getting basic information about how much greenhouse gas emissions are coming from American farms come as billions of dollars are flowing to the nation’s cattle and dairy producers.

Various government agencies, including the US Department of Agriculture, have offered nearly 100 different financial incentives for dairy and cattle farmers to build anaerobic digesters and other infrastructure to capture methane coming from their operations.

In November, advocacy groups wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, asking the agency to stop sending millions in IRA funding to build digesters, arguing that the funds would have the effect of expanding methane-intensive farming.  

They also point to recent research showing that digesters, which are intended to capture methane, may, in fact, leak quite a bit more methane than the EPA assumes in its calculations.  

Studies, based on remote sensing, have gauged that a considerable amount of methane may be leaking from digesters. But it’s unclear exactly how much because the EPA and state regulators lack the regulatory tools to measure the methane emissions in the first place—even as billions of dollars are going toward these operations.

“Getting the facility-level emissions is really important because we see that as methane sensing technologies improve, they’re casting doubt on EPA’s accuracy in measuring the effectiveness of methane digesters,” Waterman said. “But nobody’s monitoring at the facility level.”

“I don’t want to undermine the evidence that EPA has put out about methane,” Waterman added.  “But we should be doing facility-level reporting and we have a lot of work to do when it comes to comprehensively and accurately measuring methane emissions.”