Americans cut their beef consumption by 19 percent between 2005 and 2014, according to a new study by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). For a quick visualization, you — a person of average appetite somewhere in the U.S. — ate five whole cows in 2005; in 2014, you ate four, plus a few bites of a fifth.

That drop in beef intake was the main contributor to a 10 percent reduction in the amount of climate-warming pollution Americans caused through their diets, said the environmental group. NRDC estimates that reduced demand for beef, milk, high-fructose corn syrup and other products prevented pollution “roughly equivalent to the annual pollution of 57 million car tailpipes.”

The business of agriculture contributes to climate change in many ways — from methane emissions of livestock to air pollution caused by farm equipment to the energy needs of food processing. Growing feed for cattle is especially costly: It requires pesticides and fertilizers, which rely heavily on fossil fuels. The study showed that, as far as the American diet goes, beef caused about one-third of total diet-related per capita climate-warming pollution in 2014.

While beef consumption fell significantly over the decade ending in 2014, and chicken, too, lost a bit of its luster, other foods grew more popular — like dairy products. Manufacturing those foods thus accounted for more pollution than before. (Production methods didn’t change much over the time period, an NRDC policy specialist told us.)

In terms of appeal to consumers, then, beef and chicken were the past decade’s losers, and dairy was its winner. But naturally, given the nature of our work at OpenSecrets Blog, we checked to see which industry won a different contest: Lobbying.

In the lead was the dairy industry, which spent more than $6 million lobbying in 2016. It almost doubled the lobbying payments of the livestock industry, and more than quadrupled those of poultry and eggs.

The livestock industry, though, includes a farm animal we haven’t mentioned yet: Pigs. And since 2002, the top lobbying client in the livestock industry, by a growing margin, has been the National Pork Producers Council. Last year, the group spent more than $1.6 million lobbying on bills addressing issues like water quality and antibiotics.

The livestock lobby’s peak spending of nearly $3.5 million came in 2006, a few years after mad cow disease was found in the U.S. Another high was in 2009, when lobbying spending also hit more than $3 million: By late October that year, President Barack Obama had declared swine flu a national emergency.

The industry has gradually increased spending over the last three years, with 2016’s total of almost $3.3 million trailing only that of 2006.

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Chickens and eggs (or eggs and chickens) have also had some tough times, which dovetailed with higher lobbying outlays. A 2015 outbreak of avian flu decimated poultry populations in the Midwest, and that year ended up being the industry’s most prolific, with over $1.7 million spent.

That agriculture interests leaned into their lobbying when they were stricken by scandals may be no coincidence. As Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, wrote to us in an email, “[m]uch of lobbying is crisis driven. When policy problems arise, special interests will double down on their lobbying campaigns.”

We don’t have lobbying data for the 1850s, when the “swill milk scandal” caused the deaths of thousands of infants in New York, but in recent years the dairy industry has been more successful at avoiding crisis than its meatier counterparts. (There was a Chinese milk scandal in 2008, but its effects were mostly limited to China.)

In 2013, dairy’s top lobbying spenders all heavily targeted what in early 2014 became the most recent version of the farm bill, which contains a dairy subsidy. The International Dairy Foods Association led its fellow groups in the industry by pumping more than $1.7 million into lobbying that year; the following year, with the farm bill done, it spent just $750,000.

Since then, except for a slight uptick in 2015, the industry has invested less and less in Washington persuasion.

Ultimately, the dairy, livestock and poultry and eggs industries account for a relatively small portion of total agribusiness lobbying. In 2016, their outlays added up to about $11.2 million; food processing and sales — led by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Nestle SA and Kellogg Co. — surpassed $26 million, and agricultural services and products — which covers feed suppliers and agricultural chemical companies, among others — spent more than $32 million.

Still, the various subsectors of agribusiness are co-dependents. John Newton, who runs market intelligence for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in an email interview that “[s]ectors of the ag economy are connected in that as incomes rise, demand for animal proteins like poultry, beef and dairy increases. As demand for meat products rises, then more grains need to be fed to the animals.” And with a lot of other products and equipment coming into play along the way, what’s good for the goose is largely good for the gander, the cow, the chicken and the pig.

Environmentalists say they believe their messages are one reason for the decline in meat intake. “Consumption of beef and pork have been on the decline in North America and Europe for many years now, due to messages from a myriad of sources including the medical community and environmentalists on how heavy meat consumption impacts personal and planetary health,” wrote Davin Hutchins, strategist for Greenpeace’s Food For Life campaign, in an email interview. (It’s true that the medical community has warned of the dangers of excessive meat consumption.)

Meat-lovers still have lots of company, however. Although Americans are eating less meat than they did a decade ago, research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, as of 2015, the U.S. was still among the world’s top per-capita consumers of meat. It finished behind only Australia, where the average person ate nearly 199 pounds of meat per year — just one-third of a pound per person per year higher than the U.S. figure.

Nonetheless, the American meat industry would surely prefer more five-cow consumers at home — and it’s hoping for greater sales abroad, as well. Recently, the CEOs of three meat-related trade associations asked President Donald Trump to seek restored access for U.S. beef to China when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in early April. Last fall, China lifted the ban, imposed after mad cow disease was found in the U.S. in 2003, but details have yet to be negotiated.



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