© 2021
In touch with the world ... at home on the High Plains
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Cromnibus bill limits cow gas monitoring and allows school lunch flexibility

Real Science / realscience.us

The $1.1 trillion dollar spending bill President Obama signed Wednesday isn’t just about dollars and cents. The so-called “Cromnibus” bill also keeps school cafeteria fries salty and limits the government's ability to monitor cow belches.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), livestock manure and a digestive process called enteric fermentation account for about5 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Most of that comes from cattle belching methane.

Despite being a small fraction of greenhouse gas emissions when compared to electricity production and consumption (38 percent) and the transportation sector (32 percent), the government wanted to track just how much methane cows are responsible for emitting into the atmosphere.

Frank Mitloehner, a professor and air quality specialist in the animal sciences department at UC Davis, says the government would have been acting prematurely because farmers and ranchers simply don’t have the tools yet to monitor their emissions.

"This is like me asking you to quantify your carbon footprint for your household," Mitloehner said. "You would not know how to do that. You would not know how to quantify your vehicle related emissions. Or the emissions related to cooling your food or clothing your body."

Mitloehner and other researchers arein the process of developing a sort of livestock greenhouse gas calculator to help ranchers track their emissions. They’re also researching methods to curb livestock gasses through a change in diet and better manure management practices, while some South American researchers are developing fart backpacks to capture cow gas and turn it into green energy.

Congress's spending bill would also cool down some components of Michelle Obama's "passion project," improving the nutritional content of school lunches.

Provisions in the bill would give school food directors more flexibility in adopting whole grain items and more time to reduce the amount of sodium in cafeteria food, rules mandated by the 2012 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

NPR'sSalt blog reports:

The School Nutrition Association, which represents 55,000 school cafeteria professionals around the country,released a statement supporting these "flexibility" measures […] The SNA says that since the nutrition standards mandated by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act took effect in 2012, school lunch programs have lost at least1 million student customers.

The budget bill does not exempt schools from regulations if they're losing money.

In addition, the bill would require the USDA to inform Congress no later than May 1 about how to change the nation's controversial meat labeling laws.

As wepreviously reported, U.S. Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) laws are not compliant with World Trade Organization (WTO) standards and must be fixed.

The U.S. is currently appealing the WTO's fourth ruling against it's current laws, but is unlikely to succeed.

The spending bill would also prevent the USDA from closing 250 offices and cut nearly $150 million dollars in funding to programs designed to make farming more sustainable and safer for the environment.

Click here for the government's summary of all the ways the 2015 Omnibus Appropriations Bill impacts food and farming.

Peggy Lowe joined Harvest Public Media in 2011, returning to the Midwest after 22 years as a journalist in Denver and Southern California. Most recently she was at The Orange County Register, where she was a multimedia producer and writer. In Denver she worked for The Associated Press, The Denver Post and the late, great Rocky Mountain News. She was on the Denver Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Columbine. Peggy was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008-09. She is from O'Neill, the Irish Capital of Nebraska, and now lives in Kansas City. Based at KCUR, Peggy is the analyst for The Harvest Network and often reports for Harvest Public Media.