A beef industry-funded effort to teach teenagers about cattle’s climate impact was quietly scrapped following backlash from some ranchers, who disputed the premise that cows contribute to global heating.
The episode is the latest example of the livestock industry’s decades-long battle to determine what US children learn about cows and the climate.
The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) and its Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education produce a free science curriculum used by around 1.2m students across more than 100 school districts nationwide.
Late last year, the foundation announced a new lesson exploring “how cattle produce methane and its role within the broader environmental and biological systems”.
Within months it had been removed, following online criticism from ranchers, with Brett Kenzy, prominent South Dakota farmer, telling a trade paper “it’s not fair claiming that cows are harming the environment because they’re not”. Kenzy, who chairs a committee of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CAL USA), called the lesson a “slap in the face”.
“We did take it down,” Rick Henningfeld, the AFBFA education director, told an audience at CattleCon, the beef industry’s annual convention, in February. “We heard the feedback, and we are editing it, and our hope is to get it back up quickly,” according to a recording of the event shared with the Guardian.
It hasn’t yet returned. A new lesson on cattle digestion, published in July, makes no mention of methane or climate.
Since the 1990s, the beef industry has worked to shape what children learn about its products. Today, officials behind the curriculum say it “eliminate[s] negative perceptions” of the industry for “future consumers”.
The curriculum is funded by a mandatory levy on cattle sales called the “beef checkoff”. A foundation spokesperson said the topic “cannot be a 45-minute lesson”. The foundation said it is working on a longer version, reviewing research “related to the biogenic cycle” with help from unnamed researchers and university experts. It said the July lesson was “not a replacement”.
A severed climate connection
Animal agriculture advocates often claim the biogenic cycle – in which atmospheric methane breaks down within about 12 years into carbon dioxide that is then reabsorbed by grass – means cattle methane contributes little additional global heating.
But mainstream climate researchers point out that biogenic methane – which comes from living sources such as organic waste, rice paddies and livestock – is a leading cause of climate crisis, even when emissions aren’t rising.
“About 0.3C [roughly 20%] of global warming to date is maintained by our ongoing biogenic methane emissions,” said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a climate scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. “Cutting these emissions is essential to slow global warming and keep peak warming as low as possible.”
The lesson, “Methane & Cattle: A Climate Connection”, was designed to help high schoolers understand “how the natural digestive processes of cattle contribute to methane emissions and influence atmospheric dynamics”.
Using figures from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it showed that methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it has a short atmospheric life. The lesson also contained an error, stating livestock accounts for about 2% of human-caused methane emissions, when the true figure is a little over 30%, said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University.
Shindell, who chaired the UN’s 2021 Global Methane Assessment, said it was “a shame the ranchers would block students from learning about the world they will inherit”.
“The role of methane in climate change is not controversial, having been measured in the lab long ago and confirmed in satellite observations of the energy emitted by the Earth,” he said.
Incensed farmer feedback
The backlash began with Jim Mundorf, a rancher, podcaster and longtime critic of the beef checkoff. After seeing a Facebook post promoting the curriculum, Mundorf wrote an analysis on his blog, Lonesome Lands, describing the methane lesson as “one of the most infuriating things I have laid eyes on” and attacking it as condescending to farmers.
“Blaming cattle for climate change is no different than blaming volcanos, or the oceans, or lightning strikes that cause wildfires,” he wrote.
The post was republished by the ranchers coalition of CPAC, the influential conservative group, and amplified across the farming community.
“I put [the blog] out to the world. Hopefully it catches on,” Mundorf said in an interview. “And it did. I get phone calls and emails from people involved with farm bureau who were also upset about [the lesson].” According to Mundorf, farm bureau contacts later told him “they don’t think it’ll be used anymore”.
At CattleCon, responding to an audience question about the “social media heat”, Henningfeld confirmed the lesson had been removed after “feedback from some farm bureau members and some producers”.
Henningfeld said the foundation would develop a new producer review of everything published by the program, to make sure “the science is represented, the needs of the teachers [are] represented, the needs of our awesome producers shows up”.
The foundation said its review process “invites a group of producers to suggest topics and review draft materials”.
But some aren’t convinced. “What happens when those goals conflict?” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. “The censorship in the recent episode suggests that the needs of the producers prevail.”
Vivayic, a Nebraska-based consultancy that develops the program for the foundation, said the curriculum’s goal is for students to make sense of real scientific data.
Previous pressure tactics
A study published in October by Jennifer Jacquet and Loredana Loy, both from the University of Miami, examined how the NCA, a precursor of today’s National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), responded to early climate science.
Drawing on archival documents, they found that in the 1980s and 1990s the group treated global warming as a public relations problem, working to downplay US cattle’s methane emissions rather than trying to cut them.
In 1991, the study found, NCA pressure led Random House to end reprints of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles children’s book that linked cattle to global warming.
“Influencing K-12 education has been part of the National Cattlemen’s strategy for decades,” Jacquet said.
NCBA declined to comment.
In September, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees all agricultural checkoff programs, ordered them to end support for environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives as well as net-zero and climate-neutrality targets. The USDA said it had no role in the decision to remove the methane lesson.
“This is compatible with what I see happening,” Jacquet said. “The livestock industry is winning with the Trump administration and does not even need to fake that it cares, let alone that it is doing anything.”
