Last year, Tyson Foods unveiled Brazen Beef, a new line of meat the company claims produces 10% less greenhouse gas emissions from pasture to production when compared to traditionally produced cattle.

The Tyson brass say the Brazen brand comes from cattle produced under the company’s “climate-smart beef” program. Tyson says it can monitor cattle on an animal-by-animal basis and those that meet the company’s internal certification standards are slaughtered and sold as Brazen Been with, and this is hard to believe, a USDA approved “climate-friendly label.”

Climate-friendly beef? That’s stunning given livestock production is the world’s largest source of agricultural methane. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization says cattle are responsible for 62% of all emissions from animal agriculture. And individual cows emit surprising amounts of methane – as much as 264 pounds annually, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Which begs the obvious question: Exactly how is Tyson Foods managing to reduce the company’s greenhouse footprint through Brazen Beef production?

Kent Harrison, Tyson vice president of fresh meat marketing and premium programs, says, “the science behind it is pretty complex and there are a number of ‘nodes’ that feed into the data, including cow/calf climate-friendly practices at the ranch, at the feedlot and at row crops we source for the feedlot and supplemental feed.”

Which sounds a whole lot like smoke and mirrors.

Nor has USDA – which approved Tyson’s climate-friendly label – been helpful in explaining how Brazen Beef reduces greenhouse gas emissions, saying there’s no law giving the agency “on-farm oversight” authority. And Freedom of Information requests to USDA result in heavily redacted documents, claiming the need to protect Tyson “trade secrets.”

As it turns out, USDA relied on third-party certifying organizations to approve Tyson’s “climate-friendly” label including Where Foods Come From. They’re also mum, dodging questions on the science  behind its recommendation for USDA certification.

And recently, Tyson has scrubbed its website of all mention of Brazen Beef.

By now you’re probably wondering if Tyson really could pull off this magical methane reduction trick, wouldn’t it be trumpeting it to the rafters and being congratulated by all its Big Meat competitors? 

Tyson’s lack of transparency and USDA’s duplicity was ripe for a lawsuit.

The Environmental Working Group has obliged, with a suit filed in September saying Tyson has failed to provide plans on how Brazen Beef will reduce/measure greenhouse emissions – which, it rightly concluded, could very well be a scam to deceive consumers:

“Given the enormous scale of Tyson’s GHG emissions, achieving these net-zero emissions and ‘climate-smart’ beef commitments would require radical changes to the company’s production systems and products. Yet there is no credible evidence that Tyson intends to significantly innovate, alter, or diversify its current activities to achieve its ‘net zero’ goal or produce truly ‘climate-smart’ beef, even if such a radical shift in Tyson’s business model were possible. To date, Tyson has failed to articulate a plan to eliminate the vast emissions associated with the many stages of its beef, chicken, and pork production, including feed production, and has offered no details on how its industrially produced beef is a ‘climate-smart’ choice.”

Tyson hasn’t had much to say about the lawsuit, issuing a not so brazen written statement:

“While we do not comment on specific litigation, Tyson Foods has a long history of sustainable practices that embrace good stewardship of our environmental resources.”

I would say Tyson has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar way past its elbow. Unless Tyson convinces a judge otherwise, the company’s climate-smart beef program is nothing more than another Big Meat greenwash. 

Consumers beware.

The post ‘Climate-smart’ beef is an oxymoron appeared first on Investigate Midwest.