Livestock industry co-opts academics to downplay its climate impact

On campuses across the nation, students and faculty have passionately debated whether their universities should stop accepting fossil fuel money for research. But until recently, funding from the meat and dairy industries, which also contribute to climate change, had scarcely received any attention.

That may be beginning to change. A study published in the journal Climatic Change late last month cast a critical eye on two agricultural research centers that focus on the livestock industry’s carbon emissions and, as recently as last year, got much of their funding from industry donations. Housed at the University of California at Davis and Colorado State University, the centers study new technology to shrink the climate footprint of the livestock industry while regularly messaging that Americans don’t need to eat less meat and milk, contrary to what some environmentalists say.

But the report’s authors — Viveca Morris, the executive director of Yale Law School’s Law, Ethics & Animals Program, and Jennifer Jacquet, a University of Miami environmental policy professor — wrote that, in practice, the centers are operating more like arms of the industry than independent research institutions.

“It’s not as if all they’re doing is looking at kelp and methane digesters,” said Jacquet, referring to a few of the new technologies broadly supported by the livestock industry. “They’re also doing a lot of spin,” she said.

In an interview, one academic highlighted in the study — Frank Mitloehner, a UC Davis professor — disputed his center is trying to spin the facts. “The notion that I am downplaying the importance of livestock on climate is absolutely not acceptable to me,” he said.

What the report found

In 2006, the United Nations published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow” that examined the environmental impacts of farm animals. It was a public-relations nightmare for the beef and dairy industries. The report’s authors take this as their starting point, detailing how, in response, companies and livestock industry trade groups began to fund and champion the work of Mitloehner, who argued that the U.N.’s findings overstated the contribution of U.S. livestock to global warming.

Using University of California documents obtained in 2022 by the investigative arm of Greenpeace U.K., as well as publicly available records and the CVs of professors and graduate students who disclosed their funding sources, the report’s authors lay out how the industry’s financial relationship with Mitloehner and another researcher, Kimberly Stackhouse-Lawson, has evolved since.

In 2019, when Mitloehner launched his UC Davis academic group, the CLEAR Center, he did so with a $2.9 million donation from the nonprofit arm of the American Feed Industry Association and the help of a PR firm hired by the trade group to come up with the center’s name. Other funders have included the National Pork Board, the California Cattle Council, and Burger King. Since 2002, Mitloehner has received at least $5,498,000 in research funding from industry groups, the paper’s authors found, representing 46 percent of the total amount he reported. More public funding has followed — last year the center received nearly $4 million from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation.

The report’s authors write that, as the center’s director, Mitloehner became the meat and dairy industries’ go-to academic. Companies cited his research in public policy debates and when challenging the need for regulations. His relatively small Twitter following ballooned — his handle is @GHGGuru,” short for “greenhouse gas guru” — and he began to use social media and his blog to promote technological fixes to methane emissions from cattle and other livestock, while questioning climate activists’ call to reduce herd sizes.

“The details of Mitloehner’s rise to prominence show that in the twenty-first century, it was possible for the animal agriculture industry to help build a reputation of scientific credibility on topics related to climate change and attract national attention for individuals for whom little to none previously existed,” Morris and Jacquet wrote.

Although much of Mitloehner’s industry funding and pro-meat commentary has been well documented, what happened next has received less attention.

A year after the CLEAR Center launched, Colorado State University started an academic center called AgNext and hired Stackhouse-Lawson, one of Mitloehner’s former graduate students, to lead it. She was then the chief sustainability officer of JBS USA, the American subsidiary of the giant meat producer. The company is currently being sued by New York’s attorney general for allegedly making misleading claims about its greenhouse gas emission goals to boost sales, accusations that it denies.

According to the report, AgNext has received at least $750,000 from industry groups as of May 2023. Its funders include livestock trade groups, feed companies and JBS and, the report’s authors write, the majority of its advisory board members are leaders of companies that have given the center donations. In 2023, AgNext received a million dollar grant from the USDA.

In an interview, Stackhouse-Lawson said the funding amounts in the report are outdated. Donations to AgNext are “probably pretty equally split” between public and industry donations, she said.

“From a land grant university perspective, this sort of research is not new for us and this sort of funding is not new for us,” she said. “Land grant institutions have been working alongside industry partners since their inception. Those relationships allow us to better understand their challenges.”

Yet Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, who was not involved in the study, said its findings are novel.

“It connects a larger amount of funding than has been previously uncovered to a history of political activity, lobbying, and political relations associated with those gifts,” he said.

Why funding from beef and dairy companies matters

In interviews, Mitloehner and Stackhouse-Lawson said that their ties to industry are essential and valuable. Public funding for agriculture research is difficult to come by and private companies can provide access to proprietary technology and information that gives researchers insight into how to reduce carbon emissions they wouldn’t otherwise have, they said.

The paper “reads as if working with industry were a bad thing. And it’s not a bad thing,” Mitloehner said, adding that he plans to write a reply disputing its findings. He said that the paper’s authors got it backward: He’s not being influenced by big beef and dairy companies; he’s trying to change them.

“We are doing research that generates findings in and around emissions mitigation and we seek to influence the industry to adopt those technologies so that we can reduce emissions,” he said. Mitloehner compared his work to that of automobile engineers who work with big car manufacturers like Ford and Chevrolet to help them install reduce their emissions.

“I don’t work with cars, I work with cows and pigs and chicken,” he said. “And therefore I have to work with these farming organizations, as well as technology vendors, that’s how it goes.”

When researchers accept funding from private companies and trade groups, it provokes concern that they, and their findings, may be biased in favor of them. Activists have long-argued that it’s unethical for climate scientists to accept money from the very oil, gas and coal companies whose products are contributing to global warming.

Morris and Jacquet said that the broader debate over corporate funding of research is worthwhile. But in the case of the CLEAR Center and AgNext, they are less concerned with the scientific research coming out of these institutions and more worried about the ways in which the livestock industry is turning to these two academics to lend institutional legitimacy to their own arguments, they said.

According to their paper, Mitloehner has given more than 800 presentations since he joined UC Davis in 2002 and frequently talks to the media and travels internationally. Stackhouse-Lawson has given at least 90 presentations, and both have emphasized in their appearances that the meat and dairy industries in the U.S. are on track to significantly cut their emissions through voluntary action.

“The problem is how the research is being spun to impact climate policy and our understanding of both the scale and the urgency of addressing livestock emissions more broadly,” Morris said. “I think universities should refuse to conduct PR on behalf of meat and dairy groups.”

Why scientists care about emissions from livestock

As Mitloehner often points out, farming and ranching don’t generate as much carbon pollution as the burning of coal, oil and gas. But neither are they insignificant. Raising livestock is responsible for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the U.N. estimates.

Cattle are particularly problematic because their digestive process produces methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Their burps, or what researchers call “enteric emissions,” are the number one source of methane emissions from livestock.

Some meat companies are experimenting with changing the ingredients in cattle feed in hopes of lowering how much methane the produce. In California, state policy has created incentives for massive dairy farms to work on trapping methane from cow manure so that it can be turned into biofuel.

Although some climate advocates have embraced these approaches, others worry that they allow the industry to talk about the promise of projects that may never pay off, while continuing to emit large quantities of greenhouse gases.