How Beef Checkoff–Funded Education is Betraying Ranchers: CPAC Ranchers Coalition

By CPAC Ranchers Coalition, and Jim Mundorf

Most Americans have never heard of the Beef Checkoff Program, but for cattle producers, it has a constant and unavoidable presence. The Beef Checkoff Program is a federally authorized—and in some cases, state-mandated—program that requires producers to pay between one and five dollars every time an animal is sold. Those funds are intended to strengthen the beef industry and protect the cornerstone of America: ranching. What the program is not intended to do is work against the very producers who are forced to fund it. Yet, as CPAC Ranchers Coalition partner Jim Mundorf has exposed, Beef Checkoff-supported education materials are now falsely teaching students that cattle are a major driver of climate change.

At the center of this controversy is a lesson titled “Methane and Cattle: A Climate Connection,” distributed through Beef Checkoff education outreach. In it, students are taught that methane from cattle digestion is highly damaging to the climate and are instructed to explain this “problem” to farmers and ranchers themselves. The exercise condescendingly frames ranchers as uninformed and in need of correction. Missing entirely is any serious discussion of natural methane cycles, wild ruminants, or the fundamental biological reality that methane has always been a part of grazing ecosystems. This is not education—it is ideological conditioning, funded by producers and aimed against them.

This false narrative is being reinforced by powerful industry institutions that should know better. The American Angus Association, long positioned as a steward of producer interests, is now partnering with entities such as the Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub to develop a genomic EPD platform that promotes so-called “climate-friendly” beef from purportedly low-methane cattle lines. This effort is built on junk science. Methane production is primarily driven by bacterial fermentation of feedstuffs and has low heritability, rendering genetic selection claims highly dubious. Rather than empowering ranchers, these efforts accelerate vertical integration, expand corporate influence over production decisions, and further concentrate control within the same institutions that contributed to today’s cattle shortages. The ultimate objective is total corporate control over the nation’s food supply, a development that is fundamentally bad for America, undermines private property rights, and erodes the independence of family producers.

Worse still, real-world attempts to reduce methane through feed additives and experimental vaccines have already proven disastrous, with widespread reports of sickness, mortality, and miscarriages in herds. When producer-funded programs and industry institutions promote unproven science, demean ranchers, and align themselves with global climate agendas, they abandon their mission entirely. CPAC stands with our Ranchers Coalition partners in demanding transparency, accountability, and reform. At a minimum, every producer deserves to know how their dollars are being used and to decide whether this is truly the future they want for their industry.

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