Beef Industry Pulls Its Own Methane Lesson After Ranchers Push Back

The lesson was called 'Methane & Cattle: A Climate Connection'. It was built for high schoolers, funded by a mandatory levy on cattle sales known as the beef checkoff, and published late last year by the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) and its Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education. Within months, it was gone.

Ranchers howled. Brett Kenzy, a South Dakota farmer who chairs a committee at the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CAL USA), told a trade paper it was unfair to claim cows harm the environment and called the lesson a 'slap in the face'. Blogger and rancher Jim Mundorf torched it on his site Lonesome Lands as 'one of the most infuriating things I have laid eyes on'. His post got picked up by the ranchers coalition of CPAC and ricocheted through farming circles.

Rick Henningfeld, the foundation's education director, confirmed the retreat on stage at CattleCon, the industry's annual convention, in February. 'We did take it down,' he said, per a recording shared with the Guardian. 'We heard the feedback, and we are editing it, and our hope is to get it back up quickly.' It hasn't returned. A July lesson on cattle digestion mentions neither methane nor climate. The foundation says that lesson was not a replacement and that a longer version is in the works.

The science itself isn't in dispute. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis puts roughly 0.3C — about 20% — of global warming to date down to ongoing biogenic methane emissions. And the pulled lesson contained an error: it said livestock accounts for about 2% of human-caused methane emissions, when the real figure tops 30%, according to Duke climate scientist Drew Shindell, who chaired the UN's 2021 Global Methane Assessment. 'It's a shame the ranchers would block students from learning about the world they will inherit,' he said.

This fight is old. Researchers Jennifer Jacquet and Loredana Loy of the University of Miami published a study in October tracing how a precursor to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association treated global warming as a PR problem in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1991, the study found, the group pushed Random House to stop reprinting a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book that tied cattle to global warming. The NCBA declined to comment.

Now the review process is changing. Henningfeld said producers will get a formal say over everything the program publishes. Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education asked the obvious question: 'What happens when those goals conflict?' The USDA, which oversees checkoff programs, ordered them in September to drop ESG and net-zero support, but said it played no part in pulling the methane lesson. The curriculum reaches roughly 1.2 million students across more than 100 districts.