“We do have country of origin labeling for all fruits and vegetables and chicken, but not for pork and beef, So why is that?”
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Independent Cattlemen of Missouri made it clear Tuesday why they are independent: special interests have clouded the meat industry and made it more difficult for Missourians to know where they are getting their beef and pork from.
A handful of ranchers joined State Sen. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove, at a news conference in the Capitol to announce a bipartisan push to get meat products to have labels on them featuring country of origin. “It urges the federal government to reinstate country of origin labeling,” Moon said of his resolution and a similar one from State Sen. Tracy McCreery, D-St. Louis County. “The reason for this is we have come to realize that people are concerned about where their food comes from.”
Moon said all meat used to have such labels before a change was made in 2015.
“We do have country of origin labeling for all fruits and vegetables and chicken, but not for pork and beef,” he said. “So why is that?”
Students do learn about methane, but not about eating less meat.
Excerpt from this story from Sentient Climate:
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In order to reduce climate pollution, we have to talk about food. Food production accounts for roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and meat, particularly beef, is the biggest contributor to that share. Cattle produce vast amounts of methane, and raising them demands enormous quantities of land, water and feed. Yet as the scientific consensus around beef’s environmental impact has evolved, so too has the meat industry’s strategy for how we think about solutions. One fruitful approach has been to craft an educational curriculum that defines “sustainability” with no mention of what scientists say we have to do to mitigate these food-related emissions — eat less meat.
Through the federally mandated Beef Checkoff program, industry groups like the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) have long shaped public perception of beef. You might remember splashy ad campaigns like Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner, for instance.
This isn’t a new playbook. Documents from the NCBA acknowledged the climate impacts of beef as early as 1989 but worked to shift public attention. One strategy focused on shaping public opinion by targeting “influencers” — educators and the media, at that time.
“This sort of childhood intervention is not new,” Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, tells Sentient. “I see evidence that the meat industry has been intervening in childhood education since the 1990s around the issue of climate change.”
The industry has continued its outreach efforts, more recently aimed at reaching younger and more impressionable audiences, with a beef curriculum curated for classrooms, beginning as young as kindergarten and extending through high school.
For high school students, one activity focuses on methane emissions from cattle. So far, so good, as beef production does produce climate pollution. Students are asked to analyze the “inputs and outputs” associated with raising cattle and to “articulate and evaluate solutions to the methane gas emissions issue based upon obtained knowledge.”
The materials make no mention of a critical solution, however — cutting back on how much beef we eat. Eating less meat, and more plants, is one of the most effective forms of household climate action, according to Project Drawdown. A range of experts who study the issue have said the world will not be able to make its climate goals, or at least avoid the worst global warming scenarios, without cutting back on meat.
The industry’s educational materials state the opposite of this research, and they also frame it in a way that sets up a familiar straw man. “It is not possible to eliminate methane production from ruminants, short of eliminating the rumen,” one passage reads.
Note the emphasis on elimination, rather than reduction, framing the notion of dietary change as veganizing the food system essentially rather than what famed food writer Michael Pollan has described, simply, as eating “mostly plants.”
The “elimination” mentioned in the beef industry’s materials is described as “undesirable” because it would make much of Earth’s land “unusable” for growing food. The rationale is that without cattle, there would be no manure to fertilize the soil.
Big Beef is wooing science teachers with webinars and lesson plans in an attempt to change students’ perceptions of the industry.
A beef industry group is running a campaign to influence science teachers and other educators in the US. Over the past eight years, the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) has produced industry-backed lesson plans, learning resources, in-person events, and webinars as part of a program to boost the cattle industry’s reputation.
Beef has one of the highest carbon footprints of any food, but AFBFA funding documents reveal that the industry fears that science teachers are exposed to “misinformation,” “propaganda,” and “one-sided or inaccurate” information. The campaign from the AFBFA—a farming-industry-backed group that "educates" Americans about agriculture—is an attempt to fight back and leave school teachers with a “more positive perception” of the beef industry, the funding documents reveal.
According to survey data included in these documents, educators who attended at least one of the AFBFA’s programs were 8 percent more likely to trust positive statements about the beef industry. Some 82 percent of educators who participated in a program had a positive perception of how cattle are raised, and 85 percent believed that the beef industry is “very important” to society.
The beef industry “knows it has a trust issue,” says Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. The industry is attempting to influence public opinion by starting with children, says Jan Dutkiewicz at the Pratt Institute’s Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies. Dutkiewicz points out that one of the AFBFA’s objectives outlined in its most recent funding document is to run events that “engage educators and students … to increase their understanding and positive perceptions of the beef industry.”
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The AFBFA is a contractor to Beef Checkoff, a US-wide program in which beef producers and importers pay a per-animal fee that funds programs to boost beef demand in the US and abroad. In 2024, Beef Checkoff has approximately $42 million to disperse across its initiatives, and a funding request reveals that the AFBFA’s campaign for 2024 is projected to cost $800,000. The allocation of Beef Checkoff funding to programs like this is approved by members of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the Federation of State Beef Councils, two groups that represent the cattle industry in the US.
One lesson plan provided as part of the program directs students to beef industry resources to help devise a school menu. In another lesson plan students are directed to create a presentation for a conservation agency regarding the introduction of cattle into their ecological preserve. A worksheet aimed at younger students has them practice their sums by adding up the acreage of cow pastures. Another worksheet based around a bingo game aimed at 8- to 11-year-olds asks teachers to “remind students that lean beef is a nutritions source of protein that can be incorporated in daily meals.”
Science teachers in many states are currently updating their lessons to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—a set of teaching guidelines that encourage educators to place more emphasis on how science is used in the real world. AFBFA funding documents show that the foundation intends to use the adoption of the NGSS as an opportunity to provide teachers with learning materials that relate to the beef industry.
“Furthermore, NGSS requires teachers to approach challenging topics such as climate change and sustainability,” reads an AFBFA funding authorization request for its education program. It continues: “Teachers and students are receiving information from educationally trusted sources that do not represent agriculture accurately or in a balanced way, and beef production is often the target of "misinformation". To achieve balance and to ensure the accuracy of information, a concerted effort must be made to engage teachers in the conversation around these topics.”
Dutkiewicz says that food production should be taught in US schools but that industry-funded material is unlikely to provide objective information about the impact of beef production. “I worry that clearly partial resources that are strategically designed to achieve a corporate messaging are being provided by a Checkoff program,” he says.
Hot air: five climate myths pushed by the US beef industry
These are the arguments spun by big beef titans to persuade consumers that meat eating has negligible impact on the planet
“While fossil fuel consumption has done the most to put us on our dangerous path to climate catastrophe, a widely cited 2020 study in the journal Science argued that we can no longer avoid the worst of the climate crisis by cutting fossil fuels alone. Staying below the average global temperature rise of 2C – a threshold that scientists say will lead to systems collapse, mass extinctions, fatal heat waves, drought and famine, water shortages and flooded cities – will require ‘rapid and ambitious’ changes to food systems.
“The single most impactful food-related change we can make, according to their findings, is not increasing yields, ramping up agricultural efficiency or cutting food waste, though those approaches all would help. It’s adopting a plant-rich diet.
“While building out energy infrastructure can take years, changing our diet is something we can work toward today.”
The crops are grown in special greenhouses, and double in size every 3 years. Best of all, the cows come running to eat it.
Using a water-born crop that grows at breakneck speed, an innovative cattle feed startup could reduce livestock emissions in a variety of ways.
By reducing methane emissions from the bovine’s digestion, growing the plants on smaller lots than traditional feed, and using the farm’s manure to cover input costs, the aquatic feed offers protection to the invaluable beef industry from zealous politicians and activists who aren’t willing to wait for innovation to improve the carbon footprint of livestock.
Called Fyto, the startup boasts of a “library” of aquatic crop varieties that offer superior nutrition compared to other feeds like alfalfa.
The UK government plans to curb illegal deforestation to protect the rainforests by cleaning up its supply chain. The world-leading new law, proposed August 25, 2020, would prohibit larger businesses operating in the United Kingdom from using products grown on illegally deforested land. The businesses would be required to publish...
