In an oft-used quote, Milton Friedman was said to declare that it is the sole responsibility of business to increase profit. This is inaccurate. Here is Friedman, in a NY Times editorial published in 1970, quoting his own words from his book, "Capitalism and Freedom:"
... “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”
Most people who quote Friedman leave off the last part - about "open & free competition," and "without deception fraud." But even Friedman, the biggest pro-profit bogeyman in recent history, recognized the need to play fair in a capitalist system.
Keep shining the light on the fraud. Hopefully when enough people see it, they'll hold the collective corporate feet to the fires so that consumers can make informed decisions before jumping on the "climate friendly" bandwagon.
May 25, 2023Liked by Emily Atkin, Arielle Samuelson
Sounds like brazen greenwashing and numerous conflicts of interest. I’d submit Freedom of Information requests for conversations between the ag committee in Congress and Tyson and see where it takes you. Of course a lot of decisions are actually made in bars in DC and not emails or meeting minutes but USDA has to provide answers if they have them.
Thanks for this work. Greenwashing is bad enough already without our tax dollars paying for it.
Really like this format and the discussion itself, and the intersection of climate friendly marketing claims and government verification of it is super interesting. Don't know if it is something you plan to repeat in the future, but I would like to see it again.
This is all confusing, and like what was said, this raises more questions than answers. But from what I can tell there are a few things happening.
The first is that the USDA awarded Tyson and some other partners a grant to help develop a method to reduce emissions from the production of beef, like mentioned. Out of that grew Tyson's own "Climate-Smart Beef Program" which is a system of accounting for emissions across the entire supply chain of beef production. It is just a model to estimate emissions as far as I can tell, and that allows them to change specific practices which can reduce emissions.
This "Where Food Comes From" group are the people actually collecting the data and give the data to Tyson to run the model? Or maybe run the model themselves. Either way if, the model and data are accurate, it will give a final emissions number across the entire supply chain and show which practices are better to reduce emissions.
Then it appears Tyson, maybe from just testing the model or however, could somehow get a final beef product that ultimately emits 10% less than the average or normal final beef product. They are selling that as "Brazen Beef".
And back in 2021 the USDA awarded a verification company called Low Carbon Beef the ability to market beef as low carbon or I assume "climate friendly". I don't know if that is related to Brazen Beef being sold as climate friendly, or if Tyson has their own certification.
So my understanding of the questions Arielle asks at the end are, at least 10% reduction in emissions to qualify for "climate friendly" by either that Low Carbon Beef verification company or Tyson's own certification with the USDA.
The data or proof of reduced emissions would be verifying that practices that reduce emissions are used I think. It would be verification of whether or not beef producers are using the "climate friendly" practices. Because if this Smart-Beef Project is just a model, it doesn't mean anything if practices don't change right?
But that also requires the model to be accurate, and the data collected for the model to be accurate to show that climate friendly practices are actually reducing emissions. And I don't know if this is an area where there are well known climate friendly practices that beef producers just aren't using, but could switch to with better data or incentives.
And I think it is 10% lower emissions than the current average amount of emissions from beef production. I don't know if that is good enough for "climate friendly" for the marketing concerns listed and beef producers can reach more substantial emissions reductions. Or if 10% is actually an ambitious number, and really the only way to reduce emissions from beef is to stop eating it.
That is what I think is happening and I'm really curious as to what the USDA says in terms of its verification. But this is an interesting topic even beyond beef. Making sure that the regulators have the right information to even verify that sustainable practices are actually more sustainable in the first place.
"Climate friendly beef" is achievable -- and being achieved by many producers in the US and elsewhere -- but it'll be a cold day in Hell when I'll trust it coming from Tyson! For those curious about how beef, widely reviled for the methane they generate, can actually contribute to climate health, here's one of many examples of a scientific study illustrating how this is being achieved in practice: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984/full
I'd like to suggest to Arielle and Emily that instead of doing the "dead simple" thing in painting Tyson with all the scorn they deserve, it would be more constructive to look to those who are actually doing the work of generating climate-positive beef.
Note: you won't find them in Tyson's program! You'll find them with documented practices that store away in the earth more atmospheric CO2 than is accounted for by the methane they generate. A 10% reduction is indeed too little. We should be asking for 100% reduction in climate harm, and even actual climate benefit.
My guess is that Tyson is working with producers to introduce some of the concepts of Grass Fed Beef (GFB) into a greater percentage of their producers, which I would think could have the potential to reduce the amount of GHG by that percent, at least potentially. GFB is a movement that has grown considerably despite opposition from many of the mainstream suppliers and producers, where to varying degrees, beef are left on the pastures to eat grass for a longer percentage of their lives instead of being shipped to a feedlot and "finished" by feeding them lots of corn to "marbleize" the meat, i.e. add more fat. The economics of our surplus agriculture being what it is, the fattening of the beef is cheaper than feeding them for a longer time on grass, or hay if it is not the growing season/there is a drought, plus the producer is paid by the pound and a fat heifer sells for a higher price. Corn is a very intensive crop to grow with lots of fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and water, so no doubt reducing the corn has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint, though it's tricky due to the fact that there is less cow to sell. Plus consumers like the taste of corn fed beef better than GFB, although that may be changing. Some of these things are explored in a Journal of Animal Science article https://academic.oup.com/jas/article-abstract/100/2/skab374/6479671 that is worth checking out.
But I don't know if this is what Tyson is up to. Maybe they are using seaweed to feed livestock to reduce methane emissions, or any number of other things. This kind of research used to be done by Land Grant Universities instead of corporations, which made it much easier to track, and while corporations have some responsibility for transparency with public funds, they will no doubt try to privatize their insights into some kind of proprietary process. Seems like there should be some reports on their grant that would be publicly available if you can track down the grant. Good luck and great start!
Climate Friendly Beef = Clean Coal. But - regarding your methane vs coal statement, my own calculations indicate that methan produces almost three times the enerrgy per unit CO2 emitted than coal. If you can help me figure how to embed a Jupyter Notebook or a .pdf into a Substack comment I'd be glad to share the (simple) calculation. NB not claiming that methane is green.
I have a question for the beef industry: how high a wind speed does it take before cattle fall over? Possibly that's when we will see a shift away from animal protein.
I loved this format! Really great to follow along with your process and see how you build the questions and journalism behind the story.
Side note: I switched to shopping only regeneratively farmed animal protein (I go through a company called Crowd Cow) - I wonder if that falls into "climate-friendly" meat or if I'm just greenwashing myself.
Two things come to mind: for one there's a court case against Danish Crown in Denmark for marketing essensially the same scheme, with a bunch of climate and vegetatarian NGOs suing them for it being misleading marketing. The label was dropped by all major supermarkets pretty quickly after it came out so now the court case is mostly about setting precedent.
The other thing is how much this underscores how epic of a failure the entire corporate net zero concept has been. It seems like the entire purpose of it is to seek some kind of license to pump as much climate gas into the atmosphere for the next 27 years as long as they fund all kinds of climate initiatives that fall well short of just stopping what they're doing. There's really no reason we should eat as much meat as we do and finding ways to reduce meat consumption (mostly by just having more alternative options) is a lot better than paying consultants to ever so slightly optimise some aspect of meat production ...
$61 Million to Tyson. In addition to untold millions or billions in indirect subsidies via corn and soy "supports" to farmers for their feed over the years. OY! Presumably the mentions of soil sequestration and verification in the link are the first steps toward more agri-industry subsidies for doing something a bit less bad. Hopefully. CSU has shown much more carbon sequestration in pastures grazed by cattle that are not treated with regular antibiotics for growth. Banning those is good first step, but I doubt that will be a result of this.
As I read this, I wondered why is it that these major agri-business producers are the ones to get the mega-million Federal grants, rather than the actual organic, best-practice producers? It’s infuriating. This is pure BS, just like “clean” coal and “natural” gas. And does the USDA have a “climate-friendly” process or not? It’s pretty binary. Thanks for following this important topic.
Calling it "Brazen Beef" feels a little on the nose given the unverifiability of these climate-friendly claims.
In an oft-used quote, Milton Friedman was said to declare that it is the sole responsibility of business to increase profit. This is inaccurate. Here is Friedman, in a NY Times editorial published in 1970, quoting his own words from his book, "Capitalism and Freedom:"
... “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”
Most people who quote Friedman leave off the last part - about "open & free competition," and "without deception fraud." But even Friedman, the biggest pro-profit bogeyman in recent history, recognized the need to play fair in a capitalist system.
Keep shining the light on the fraud. Hopefully when enough people see it, they'll hold the collective corporate feet to the fires so that consumers can make informed decisions before jumping on the "climate friendly" bandwagon.
Sounds like brazen greenwashing and numerous conflicts of interest. I’d submit Freedom of Information requests for conversations between the ag committee in Congress and Tyson and see where it takes you. Of course a lot of decisions are actually made in bars in DC and not emails or meeting minutes but USDA has to provide answers if they have them.
Thanks for this work. Greenwashing is bad enough already without our tax dollars paying for it.
For a deep dive into how much Tyson knows about what its ranchers are doing, check out this podcast from NPR https://www.ghostherd.org
This. This is why I love what you are doing. Thank you for asking the good questions and for being transparent about your process.
Great reporting. Like your new column “Wormhole”.
Really like this format and the discussion itself, and the intersection of climate friendly marketing claims and government verification of it is super interesting. Don't know if it is something you plan to repeat in the future, but I would like to see it again.
This is all confusing, and like what was said, this raises more questions than answers. But from what I can tell there are a few things happening.
The first is that the USDA awarded Tyson and some other partners a grant to help develop a method to reduce emissions from the production of beef, like mentioned. Out of that grew Tyson's own "Climate-Smart Beef Program" which is a system of accounting for emissions across the entire supply chain of beef production. It is just a model to estimate emissions as far as I can tell, and that allows them to change specific practices which can reduce emissions.
This "Where Food Comes From" group are the people actually collecting the data and give the data to Tyson to run the model? Or maybe run the model themselves. Either way if, the model and data are accurate, it will give a final emissions number across the entire supply chain and show which practices are better to reduce emissions.
Then it appears Tyson, maybe from just testing the model or however, could somehow get a final beef product that ultimately emits 10% less than the average or normal final beef product. They are selling that as "Brazen Beef".
And back in 2021 the USDA awarded a verification company called Low Carbon Beef the ability to market beef as low carbon or I assume "climate friendly". I don't know if that is related to Brazen Beef being sold as climate friendly, or if Tyson has their own certification.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/low-carbon-beef-approved-as-a-usda-process-verified-program-service-provider-301438951.html
So my understanding of the questions Arielle asks at the end are, at least 10% reduction in emissions to qualify for "climate friendly" by either that Low Carbon Beef verification company or Tyson's own certification with the USDA.
The data or proof of reduced emissions would be verifying that practices that reduce emissions are used I think. It would be verification of whether or not beef producers are using the "climate friendly" practices. Because if this Smart-Beef Project is just a model, it doesn't mean anything if practices don't change right?
But that also requires the model to be accurate, and the data collected for the model to be accurate to show that climate friendly practices are actually reducing emissions. And I don't know if this is an area where there are well known climate friendly practices that beef producers just aren't using, but could switch to with better data or incentives.
And I think it is 10% lower emissions than the current average amount of emissions from beef production. I don't know if that is good enough for "climate friendly" for the marketing concerns listed and beef producers can reach more substantial emissions reductions. Or if 10% is actually an ambitious number, and really the only way to reduce emissions from beef is to stop eating it.
That is what I think is happening and I'm really curious as to what the USDA says in terms of its verification. But this is an interesting topic even beyond beef. Making sure that the regulators have the right information to even verify that sustainable practices are actually more sustainable in the first place.
Thank you for looking into this!
"Climate friendly beef" is achievable -- and being achieved by many producers in the US and elsewhere -- but it'll be a cold day in Hell when I'll trust it coming from Tyson! For those curious about how beef, widely reviled for the methane they generate, can actually contribute to climate health, here's one of many examples of a scientific study illustrating how this is being achieved in practice: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984/full
I'd like to suggest to Arielle and Emily that instead of doing the "dead simple" thing in painting Tyson with all the scorn they deserve, it would be more constructive to look to those who are actually doing the work of generating climate-positive beef.
Note: you won't find them in Tyson's program! You'll find them with documented practices that store away in the earth more atmospheric CO2 than is accounted for by the methane they generate. A 10% reduction is indeed too little. We should be asking for 100% reduction in climate harm, and even actual climate benefit.
Contact the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) -- Office of Communications (https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/) to get you in touch with USDA scientists. ARS is the arm of the USDA that would be most knowledgeable about climate change. For example, see https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2019/study-clarifies-us-beefs-resource-use-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions/.
My guess is that Tyson is working with producers to introduce some of the concepts of Grass Fed Beef (GFB) into a greater percentage of their producers, which I would think could have the potential to reduce the amount of GHG by that percent, at least potentially. GFB is a movement that has grown considerably despite opposition from many of the mainstream suppliers and producers, where to varying degrees, beef are left on the pastures to eat grass for a longer percentage of their lives instead of being shipped to a feedlot and "finished" by feeding them lots of corn to "marbleize" the meat, i.e. add more fat. The economics of our surplus agriculture being what it is, the fattening of the beef is cheaper than feeding them for a longer time on grass, or hay if it is not the growing season/there is a drought, plus the producer is paid by the pound and a fat heifer sells for a higher price. Corn is a very intensive crop to grow with lots of fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and water, so no doubt reducing the corn has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint, though it's tricky due to the fact that there is less cow to sell. Plus consumers like the taste of corn fed beef better than GFB, although that may be changing. Some of these things are explored in a Journal of Animal Science article https://academic.oup.com/jas/article-abstract/100/2/skab374/6479671 that is worth checking out.
But I don't know if this is what Tyson is up to. Maybe they are using seaweed to feed livestock to reduce methane emissions, or any number of other things. This kind of research used to be done by Land Grant Universities instead of corporations, which made it much easier to track, and while corporations have some responsibility for transparency with public funds, they will no doubt try to privatize their insights into some kind of proprietary process. Seems like there should be some reports on their grant that would be publicly available if you can track down the grant. Good luck and great start!
Climate Friendly Beef = Clean Coal. But - regarding your methane vs coal statement, my own calculations indicate that methan produces almost three times the enerrgy per unit CO2 emitted than coal. If you can help me figure how to embed a Jupyter Notebook or a .pdf into a Substack comment I'd be glad to share the (simple) calculation. NB not claiming that methane is green.
I have a question for the beef industry: how high a wind speed does it take before cattle fall over? Possibly that's when we will see a shift away from animal protein.
I loved this format! Really great to follow along with your process and see how you build the questions and journalism behind the story.
Side note: I switched to shopping only regeneratively farmed animal protein (I go through a company called Crowd Cow) - I wonder if that falls into "climate-friendly" meat or if I'm just greenwashing myself.
Two things come to mind: for one there's a court case against Danish Crown in Denmark for marketing essensially the same scheme, with a bunch of climate and vegetatarian NGOs suing them for it being misleading marketing. The label was dropped by all major supermarkets pretty quickly after it came out so now the court case is mostly about setting precedent.
The other thing is how much this underscores how epic of a failure the entire corporate net zero concept has been. It seems like the entire purpose of it is to seek some kind of license to pump as much climate gas into the atmosphere for the next 27 years as long as they fund all kinds of climate initiatives that fall well short of just stopping what they're doing. There's really no reason we should eat as much meat as we do and finding ways to reduce meat consumption (mostly by just having more alternative options) is a lot better than paying consultants to ever so slightly optimise some aspect of meat production ...
$61 Million to Tyson. In addition to untold millions or billions in indirect subsidies via corn and soy "supports" to farmers for their feed over the years. OY! Presumably the mentions of soil sequestration and verification in the link are the first steps toward more agri-industry subsidies for doing something a bit less bad. Hopefully. CSU has shown much more carbon sequestration in pastures grazed by cattle that are not treated with regular antibiotics for growth. Banning those is good first step, but I doubt that will be a result of this.
As I read this, I wondered why is it that these major agri-business producers are the ones to get the mega-million Federal grants, rather than the actual organic, best-practice producers? It’s infuriating. This is pure BS, just like “clean” coal and “natural” gas. And does the USDA have a “climate-friendly” process or not? It’s pretty binary. Thanks for following this important topic.