State lawmakers are considering changing Wisconsin's official definition of "bingo" at the request of an Illinois-based company operating free "Xtreme Bar Bingo" events at dozens of taverns.
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Officials said they have found bird flu in a Wisconsin dairy herd for the first time.
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The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 25, includes several of the Wisconsin architect’s chair designs that had never been fabricated until now.
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Cows graze at Nice Farms Creamery in Federalsburg, Maryland. (Photo by Preston Keres/USDA)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend $700 million to support regenerative agriculture as part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Wednesday.
The USDA pilot program for regenerative agriculture — a conservation management approach centered on improving the health of soil and increasing biodiversity — enacts part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s September “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” which offered more than 120 recommendations for addressing childhood chronic diseases.
The pilot program will take funding from existing USDA conservation programs, which provide financial and technical assistance to farmers, with the aim of improving soil health.
“Protecting and improving the health of our soil is critical, not only for the future viability of farmland, but to the future success of American farmers,” Rollins said at a press conference alongside Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“In order to continue to be the most productive and most efficient growers in the world, we must protect our topsoil from unnecessary erosion and boost the microbiome of the soil,” Rollins said.
Kennedy said a September report from the administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which the health secretary chairs, included “the promise to make it easier for farmers in this country, to give them an off-ramp — farmers who are dependent on … chemical and fertilizer inputs — to give them an off-ramp where they can transition to a model that emphasizes soil health.”
Kennedy has long advocated against use of chemicals in farming.
The department will dedicate $400 million to the initiative through the department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program and $300 million from its Conservation Stewardship Program, according to a USDA press release.
“It’s baseline funding that we received through our budget, so we have the ability to tag that funding specifically for this pilot, and that’s what we’re doing,” Aubrey J.D. Bettencourt, chief of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, said.
Rollins also said she would seek corporate partners for the program using a 2022 law that authorizes USDA to channel private contributions to conservation programs.
The move “will bring corporate label and supply chain partners directly into partnership” with NRCS, Rollins said.
The pilot program “connects the producer and the work that they’re doing on the farm, granting them the credit for that voluntary action of change in practice on their farm that then can transition into the supply chain, into the marketplace and directly back to the consumer,” Bettencourt said.
Meanwhile, Rollins and Kennedy also announced Wednesday six more states whose waivers were approved to prohibit Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits from being used to purchase certain non-nutritious items beginning in 2026.
The effort, also part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, adds Hawaii, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee to the list of states that will have such bans.
The bans restrict which items recipients of the federal food assistance program that helps 42 million Americans afford groceries can buy with their SNAP benefits.
Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia already have similar incoming bans.
Hudson native Amy Timberlake crafts winter scenes and centers Wisconsin’s unique glacial topography in the plot of her latest book for young readers.
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Most of the package is earmarked for row-crop producers. It aims to help farmers — especially those who grow soybeans — balance out losses from high costs and a trade war with China.
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Wisconsin is reviewing registration of pesticides that some Wisconsin farm groups say would help manage pests and disease, but some scientists and environmentalists argue they contain PFAS.
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“Our mission is to educate, collect, and preserve Marathon County history," said Blake Opal-Wahoske, executive director of the Marathon County Historical Society. "This is a way to deepen that sense of belonging and community."
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Tom and Kristi Manus of Eau Claire talk about some road trip stops they curate in their latest book, “Historic Wisconsin Roadsides: Towns Off the Beaten Path in the Badger State."
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The Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance works to reduce the impact of human-caused shrinkage of its beloved lake.
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Some tree farms in the central U.S. are selling more potted Christmas trees as people seek out an eco-friendly option or look to get more than one use out of their evergreens.
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The latest federal data shows sales of milk beverages turned around in 2024, increasing by 358 million pounds or just under 1 percentage point from the previous year.
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For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90 million acres — about the size of Montana — and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.
But a growing body of research reveals that America’s obsession with corn has a steep price: The fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.
Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.
Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when that nitrogen breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.
Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and corn uses more than two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer nationwide — making it the leading driver of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, studies show.
The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol — which now consumes more than 40% of the U.S. corn crop — is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.
Since 2000, U.S. corn production has surged almost 50%, further adding to the crop’s climate impact.
Yet the environmental costs of corn rarely make headlines or factor into political debates. Much of the dynamic traces back to federal policy — and to the powerful corn and ethanol lobby that helped shape it.
The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid 2000s, required that gasoline be blended with ethanol, a biofuel that in the United States comes almost entirely from corn. That mandate drove up demand and prices for corn, spurring farmers to plant more of it.
Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn,” demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions.
At the same time, federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify. Taxpayers have covered more than $50 billion in corn insurance premiums over the past 30 years, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.
Researchers say proven conservation steps — such as planting rows of trees, shrubs and grasses in corn fields — could sharply reduce these emissions. But the Trump administration has eliminated many of the incentives that helped farmers try such practices.
Experts say it all raises a larger question: If America’s most widely planted crop is worsening climate change, shouldn’t we begin growing it a different way?
Corn has been a staple of U.S. agriculture for centuries, first domesticated by Native Americans and later used by European immigrants as a versatile crop for food and animal feed. Its production really took off in the 2000s after federal mandates and incentives helped turn much of America’s corn crop into ethanol.
Corn’s dominance — and the emissions that come with it — didn’t happen by accident. It was built through a high-dollar lobbying campaign that continues today.
In the late 1990s, America’s corn farmers were in trouble. Prices had cratered amid a global grain glut and the Asian financial crisis. A 1999 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said crop prices had hit “rock bottom.”
In 2001 and 2002, the federal government gave corn farmers and ethanol producers a boost — first through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bioenergy Program, which paid ethanol producers to increase their use of farm commodities for fuel. Then the 2002 Farm Bill created programs that continue to support ethanol and other renewable energy.
Corn growers soon after mounted an all-out campaign in Washington. Their goal: persuade Congress to require gasoline to be blended with ethanol. State and national grower groups lobbied relentlessly, pitching ethanol as a way to cut greenhouse gasses, reduce oil dependence and revive rural economies.
“We got down to a couple of votes in Congress, and the corn growers were united like never before,” recalled Jon Doggett, then the industry’s chief lobbyist, in an article published by the National Corn Growers Association. “I started receiving calls from Capitol Hill saying, ‘Would you have your growers stop calling us? We are with you.’ I had not seen anything like it before and haven’t seen anything like it since.”
Their persistence paid off. In 2005, Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that a certain amount of ethanol be blended into U.S. gasoline each year. Two years later, lawmakers expanded it further. The policy transformed the market: The amount of corn used for ethanol domestically has more than tripled in the past 20 years.
When demand for corn spiked as a result of the RFS, it pushed up prices worldwide, said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The result, Searchinger said, is that more land around the world got cleared to grow corn. That, in turn, resulted in more emissions.
That lobbying brought clout. “King Corn” became a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Since 2010, national corn and ethanol trade groups have spent more than $55 million on lobbying and millions more on political donations, according to campaign finance records analyzed by Floodlight.
In 2024 alone, those trade groups spent twice as much on lobbying as the National Rifle Association. Major industry players — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ethanol giant POET among them — have poured even more into Washington, ensuring the sector’s voice remains one of the loudest in U.S. agriculture.
Now those same groups are pushing for the next big prize: expanding higher-ethanol gasoline blends and positioning ethanol-based jet fuel as aviation’s “low-carbon” future.
Corn and ethanol trade groups didn’t make their officials available for interviews.
But on their websites and in their literature, they have promoted corn ethanol as a climate-friendly fuel.
The Renewable Fuels Association cites government and university research that finds burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40-50% compared with gasoline. The ethanol industry says the climate critics have it wrong — and that most of the corn used for fuel comes from better yields and smarter farming, not from plowing up new land. The amount of fertilizer required to produce a bushel of corn has dropped sharply in recent decades, they say.
“Ethanol reduces carbon emissions, removing the carbon equivalent of 12 million cars from the road each year,” according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
Growth Energy, a major ethanol trade group, said in a written statement that U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are “constantly finding new ways to make their operations more efficient and more environmentally beneficial,” using things like cover crops to reduce their carbon footprint.
But some research tells a different story.
A recent Environmental Working Group report finds that the way corn is grown in much of the Midwest — with the same fields planted in corn year after year — carries a heavy climate cost.
Research in 2022 by agricultural land use expert Tyler Lark and colleagues links the Renewable Fuel Standard to expanded corn cultivation, heavier fertilizer use, worsening water pollution and increased emissions. Scientists typically convert greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane into their carbon dioxide equivalents — or carbon intensity — so their warming impacts can be compared on the same scale.
“The carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher,” the authors concluded.
Lark’s research has been disputed by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, Purdue University and the University of Illinois, who published a formal rebuttal arguing the study relied on “questionable assumptions” and faulty modeling — a charge Lark’s team has rejected.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the RFS was unlikely to meet its greenhouse gas goals because the U.S. relies predominantly on corn ethanol and produces relatively little of the cleaner, advanced biofuels made from waste.
The problem isn’t just emissions, researchers say. Corn ethanol requires millions of acres that could instead be used for food crops or more efficient energy sources. One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land.
“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can’t solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”
Most of the country’s top crop isn’t feeding people. More than 40% of U.S. corn goes to ethanol. A similar amount is used to feed livestock, and just 12% ends up as food or in other uses.
Globally, corn production doubled from 2000 to 2021.
That growth has been fueled by fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide that can linger in the atmosphere for more than a century. That eats away at the ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Global emissions have soared alongside corn production. Between 1980 and 2020, nitrous oxide emissions from human activity climbed 40%, the Global Carbon project found.
In the United States, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture in 2022 were equal to roughly 262 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s equivalent to putting almost 56 million passenger cars on the road.
The biggest increases are coming straight from the Corn Belt.
Ethanol’s climate footprint isn’t the only concern. The nitrogen used to grow corn and other crops is also a key source of drinking water pollution.
According to a new report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Clean Wisconsin, more than 90% of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin’s groundwater is linked to agricultural sources — mostly synthetic fertilizer and manure.
The same analysis estimates that in 2022, farmers applied more than 16 million pounds of nitrogen beyond what crops needed, sending runoff into wells, streams and other water systems.
For families like Tyler Frye’s, that hits close to home. In 2022, Frye and his wife moved into a new home in the rural village of Casco, Wisconsin, about 20 miles east of Green Bay. A free test soon afterward found their well water had nitrate levels more than twice the EPA’s safe limit. “We were pretty shocked,” he said.
Frye installed a reverse-osmosis system in the basement and still buys bottled water for his wife, who is breastfeeding their daughter, born in July.
One likely culprit, he suspects, are the cornfields less than 200 yards from his home.
“Crops like corn require a lot of nitrogen,” he said. “A lot of that stuff, I assume, is getting into the well water and surface water.”
When he watches manure or fertilizer being spread on nearby fields, he said, one question nags him: “Where does that go?”
Reducing corn’s climate footprint is possible — but the farmers trying to do it are swimming against the policy tide.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backed by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, strips out the provisions of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that had rewarded farmers for climate-friendly practices.
And in April, Trump’s USDA canceled the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, a grant program designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said that the program’s administrative costs meant too little money was reaching farmers, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed it as part of the “green new scam.”
University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi said the rollback of the Climate-Smart program has already given farmers “cold feet” about adopting conservation practices. “The impact of this has been devastating,” said Secchi, a natural resources economist who teaches at the university’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability.
Research shows what’s possible if farmers had support. In its recent report, the Environmental Working Group found that four proven conservation practices — including planting trees, shrubs and hedgerows in corn fields — could make a measurable difference.
Implementing those practices on just 4% of continuous corn acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would cut total greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking more than 850,000 gasoline cars off the road, EWG found.
Despite setbacks at the federal level, some farmers are already showing what a more climate-friendly Corn Belt could look like.
In northern Iowa, Wendy Johnson farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans with her father. On 130 of those acres, she’s trying something different: She’s planting fruit and nut trees, organic grains, shrubs and other plants that need little or no nitrogen fertilizer.
“The more perennials we can have on the ground, the better it is for the climate,” she said.
Across the rest of the farm, they enrich the soil by rotating crops and planting cover crops. They’ve also converted less productive parts of the fields into “prairie strips” — bands of prairie grass that store carbon and require no fertilizer.
Under the now-canceled Climate-Smart grant program, they were supposed to receive technical assistance and about $20,000 a year to expand those practices. The grant program was terminated before they got any of the money.
“It’s hard to take risks on your own,” Johnson said. “That’s where federal support really helps. Because agriculture is a high-risk occupation.”
The economics still favor business as usual. Johnson knows that many Midwestern corn growers feel pressure to maximize yields, keeping them hooked on corn — and nitrogen fertilizer.
“I think a lot of farmers around here are very allergic to trees,” she joked.
In southeast Iowa, sixth-generation farmer Levi Lyle, who mixes organic and conventional methods across 290 acres, uses a three-year rotation, extensive cover crops and a technique called roller-crimping — flattening rye each spring to create a mulch that suppresses weeds, feeds the soil and reduces fertilizer needs.
“The roller crimping of cover crops is a huge, huge opportunity to sequester more carbon, improve soil health, save money on chemicals and still get a similar yield,” he said.
But farmers get few government incentives to take such climate-friendly steps, Lyle said. “There is a lack of seriousness about supporting farmers to implement these new practices,” he said.
And without federal programs to offset the risk, the innovations that Lyle and Johnson are trying remain exceptions — not the norm.
Many farmers still see prairie strips or patches of trees as a waste, said Luke Gran, whose company helps Iowa farmers establish perennials.
“My eyes do not lie,” Gran said. “I have not seen extensive change to cover cropping or tillage across the broad acreage of this state that I love.”
Despite mounting research about corn’s climate costs, industry groups are pushing for policies to boost ethanol demand.
One big priority: pushing a bill to require that new cars are able to run on gas with more ethanol than what’s commonly sold today.
Corn and biofuel trade groups have also been pressing Democrats and Republicans in Congress for legislation to pave the way for ethanol-based jet fuel. While use of such “sustainable” aviation fuel is still in its early stages domestically, corn and biofuel associations have made developing a market for it a top policy priority.
Secchi, the Iowa professor, says it’s easy to see why ethanol producers are trying to expand their market: The growth in electric vehicles threatens long-term gasoline sales.
Researchers warn that producing enough ethanol-based jet fuel could trigger major land use shifts. A 2024 World Resources Institute analysis found that meeting the federal goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol jet fuel would require about 114 million acres of corn — roughly 20% more corn acreage than the U.S. already plants for all purposes. That surge in demand, the authors concluded, would push up food prices and worsen hunger.
Secchi calls that scenario a climate and land use “disaster.” Large-scale use of ethanol-based aviation fuel, she said, would mean clearing even more land and pouring on even more nitrogen fertilizer, driving up greenhouse gas emissions.
“The result,” she said, “would be essentially to enshrine this dysfunctional system that we created.”
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
Corn’s clean energy promise is clashing with its climate footprint is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
WPR Music producer Ava Kuredjian interviewed Dr. Jonathan Øverby, host and executive producer of "The Road to Higher Ground" on WPR Music.
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President George W. Bush holds an ear of corn during a 2004 campaign stop at a farmer’s market in Davenport, Iowa. America’s corn industry has become a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Corn production has surged in recent decades. But the fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water, researchers have found. (Tim Sloan / AFP via Getty Images)
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90 million acres — about the size of Montana — and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.
But a growing body of research reveals that America’s obsession with corn has a steep price: The fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.
Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.
Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when that nitrogen breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.
Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and corn uses more than two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer nationwide — making it the leading driver of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, studies show.
The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol — which now consumes more than 40% of the U.S. corn crop — is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.
Since 2000, U.S. corn production has surged almost 50%, further adding to the crop’s climate impact.
Yet the environmental costs of corn rarely make headlines or factor into political debates. Much of the dynamic traces back to federal policy — and to the powerful corn and ethanol lobby that helped shape it.
The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid 2000s, required that gasoline be blended with ethanol, a biofuel that in the United States comes almost entirely from corn. That mandate drove up demand and prices for corn, spurring farmers to plant more of it.
Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn,” demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions.
At the same time, federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify. Taxpayers have covered more than $50 billion in corn insurance premiums over the past 30 years, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.
Researchers say proven conservation steps — such as planting rows of trees, shrubs and grasses in corn fields — could sharply reduce these emissions. But the Trump administration has eliminated many of the incentives that helped farmers try such practices.
Experts say it all raises a larger question: If America’s most widely planted crop is worsening climate change, shouldn’t we begin growing it a different way?
Corn has been a staple of U.S. agriculture for centuries, first domesticated by Native Americans and later used by European immigrants as a versatile crop for food and animal feed. Its production really took off in the 2000s after federal mandates and incentives helped turn much of America’s corn crop into ethanol.
Corn’s dominance — and the emissions that come with it — didn’t happen by accident. It was built through a high-dollar lobbying campaign that continues today.
In the late 1990s, America’s corn farmers were in trouble. Prices had cratered amid a global grain glut and the Asian financial crisis. A 1999 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said crop prices had hit “rock bottom.”
In 2001 and 2002, the federal government gave corn farmers and ethanol producers a boost — first through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bioenergy Program, which paid ethanol producers to increase their use of farm commodities for fuel. Then the 2002 Farm Bill created programs that continue to support ethanol and other renewable energy.
Corn growers soon after mounted an all-out campaign in Washington. Their goal: persuade Congress to require gasoline to be blended with ethanol. State and national grower groups lobbied relentlessly, pitching ethanol as a way to cut greenhouse gasses, reduce oil dependence and revive rural economies.
“We got down to a couple of votes in Congress, and the corn growers were united like never before,” recalled Jon Doggett, then the industry’s chief lobbyist, in an article published by the National Corn Growers Association. “I started receiving calls from Capitol Hill saying, ‘Would you have your growers stop calling us? We are with you.’ I had not seen anything like it before and haven’t seen anything like it since.”
Their persistence paid off. In 2005, Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that a certain amount of ethanol be blended into U.S. gasoline each year. Two years later, lawmakers expanded it further. The policy transformed the market: The amount of corn used for ethanol domestically has more than tripled in the past 20 years.
When demand for corn spiked as a result of the RFS, it pushed up prices worldwide, said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The result, Searchinger said, is that more land around the world got cleared to grow corn. That, in turn, resulted in more emissions.
That lobbying brought clout. “King Corn” became a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Since 2010, national corn and ethanol trade groups have spent more than $55 million on lobbying and millions more on political donations, according to campaign finance records analyzed by Floodlight.
In 2024 alone, those trade groups spent twice as much on lobbying as the National Rifle Association. Major industry players — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ethanol giant POET among them — have poured even more into Washington, ensuring the sector’s voice remains one of the loudest in U.S. agriculture.
Now those same groups are pushing for the next big prize: expanding higher-ethanol gasoline blends and positioning ethanol-based jet fuel as aviation’s “low-carbon” future.
Corn and ethanol trade groups didn’t make their officials available for interviews.
But on their websites and in their literature, they have promoted corn ethanol as a climate-friendly fuel.
The Renewable Fuels Association cites government and university research that finds burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40-50% compared with gasoline. The ethanol industry says the climate critics have it wrong — and that most of the corn used for fuel comes from better yields and smarter farming, not from plowing up new land. The amount of fertilizer required to produce a bushel of corn has dropped sharply in recent decades, they say.
“Ethanol reduces carbon emissions, removing the carbon equivalent of 12 million cars from the road each year,” according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
Growth Energy, a major ethanol trade group, said in a written statement that U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are “constantly finding new ways to make their operations more efficient and more environmentally beneficial,” using things like cover crops to reduce their carbon footprint.
But some research tells a different story.
A recent Environmental Working Group report finds that the way corn is grown in much of the Midwest — with the same fields planted in corn year after year — carries a heavy climate cost.
Research in 2022 by agricultural land use expert Tyler Lark and colleagues links the Renewable Fuel Standard to expanded corn cultivation, heavier fertilizer use, worsening water pollution and increased emissions. Scientists typically convert greenhouse gasses like nitrous oxide and methane into their carbon-dioxide equivalents — or carbon intensity — so their warming impacts can be compared on the same scale.
“The carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher,” the authors concluded.
Lark’s research has been disputed by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, Purdue University and the University of Illinois, who published a formal rebuttal arguing the study relied on “questionable assumptions” and faulty modeling — a charge Lark’s team has rejected.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the RFS was unlikely to meet its greenhouse gas goals because the U.S. relies predominantly on corn ethanol and produces relatively little of the cleaner, advanced biofuels made from waste.
The problem isn’t just emissions, researchers say. Corn ethanol requires millions of acres that could instead be used for food crops or more efficient energy sources. One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land.
“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can’t solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”
Most of the country’s top crop isn’t feeding people. More than 40% of U.S. corn goes to ethanol. A similar amount is used to feed livestock, and just 12% ends up as food or in other uses.
Globally, corn production doubled from 2000 to 2021.
That growth has been fueled by fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide that can linger in the atmosphere for more than a century. That eats away at the ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Global emissions have soared alongside corn production. Between 1980 and 2020, nitrous oxide emissions from human activity climbed 40%, the Global Carbon project found.
In the United States, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture in 2022 were equal to roughly 262 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s equivalent to putting almost 56 million passenger cars on the road.
The biggest increases are coming straight from the Corn Belt.
Ethanol’s climate footprint isn’t the only concern. The nitrogen used to grow corn and other crops is also a key source of drinking water pollution.
According to a new report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Clean Wisconsin, more than 90% of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin’s groundwater is linked to agricultural sources — mostly synthetic fertilizer and manure.
The same analysis estimates that in 2022, farmers applied more than 16 million pounds of nitrogen beyond what crops needed, sending runoff into wells, streams and other water systems.
For families like Tyler Frye’s, that hits close to home. In 2022, Frye and his wife moved into a new home in the rural village of Casco, Wisconsin, about 20 miles east of Green Bay. A free test soon afterward found their well water had nitrate levels more than twice the EPA’s safe limit. “We were pretty shocked,” he said.
Frye installed a reverse-osmosis system in the basement and still buys bottled water for his wife, who is breastfeeding their daughter, born in July.
One likely culprit, he suspects, are the cornfields less than 200 yards from his home.
“Crops like corn require a lot of nitrogen,” he said. “A lot of that stuff, I assume, is getting into the well water and surface water.”
When he watches manure or fertilizer being spread on nearby fields, he said, one question nags him: “Where does that go?”
Reducing corn’s climate footprint is possible — but the farmers trying to do it are swimming against the policy tide.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backed by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, strips out the provisions of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that had rewarded farmers for climate-friendly practices.
And in April, Trump’s USDA canceled the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, a grant program designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said that the program’s administrative costs meant too little money was reaching farmers, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed it as part of the “green new scam.”
University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi said the rollback of the Climate-Smart program has already given farmers “cold feet” about adopting conservation practices. “The impact of this has been devastating,” said Secchi, a natural resources economist who teaches at the university’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability.
Research shows what’s possible if farmers had support. In its recent report, the Environmental Working Group found that four proven conservation practices — including planting trees, shrubs and hedgerows in corn fields — could make a measurable difference.
Implementing those practices on just 4% of continuous corn acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would cut total greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking more than 850,000 gasoline cars off the road, EWG found.
Despite setbacks at the federal level, some farmers are already showing what a more climate-friendly Corn Belt could look like.
In northern Iowa, Wendy Johnson farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans with her father. On 130 of those acres, she’s trying something different: She’s planting fruit and nut trees, organic grains, shrubs and other plants that need little or no nitrogen fertilizer.
“The more perennials we can have on the ground, the better it is for the climate,” she said.
Across the rest of the farm, they enrich the soil by rotating crops and planting cover crops. They’ve also converted less productive parts of the fields into “prairie strips” — bands of prairie grass that store carbon and require no fertilizer.
Under the now-cancelled Climate-Smart grant program, they were supposed to receive technical assistance and about $20,000 a year to expand those practices. The grant program was terminated before they got any of the money.
“It’s hard to take risks on your own,” Johnson said. “That’s where federal support really helps. Because agriculture is a high-risk occupation.”
The economics still favor business as usual. Johnson knows that many Midwestern corn growers feel pressure to maximize yields, keeping them hooked on corn — and nitrogen fertilizer.
“I think a lot of farmers around here are very allergic to trees,” she joked.
In southeast Iowa, sixth-generation farmer Levi Lyle, who mixes organic and conventional methods across 290 acres, uses a three-year rotation, extensive cover crops and a technique called roller-crimping — flattening rye each spring to create a mulch that suppresses weeds, feeds the soil and reduces fertilizer needs.
“The roller crimping of cover crops is a huge, huge opportunity to sequester more carbon, improve soil health, save money on chemicals and still get a similar yield,” he said.
But farmers get few government incentives to take such climate-friendly steps, Lyle said. “There is a lack of seriousness about supporting farmers to implement these new practices,” he said.
And without federal programs to offset the risk, the innovations that Lyle and Johnson are trying remain exceptions — not the norm.
Many farmers still see prairie strips or patches of trees as a waste, said Luke Gran, whose company helps Iowa farmers establish perennials.
“My eyes do not lie,” Gran said. “I have not seen extensive change to cover cropping or tillage across the broad acreage of this state that I love.”
Despite mounting research about corn’s climate costs, industry groups are pushing for policies to boost ethanol demand.
One big priority: Pushing a bill to require that new cars are able to run on gas with more ethanol than what’s commonly sold today.
Corn and biofuel trade groups have also been pressing Democrats and Republicans in Congress for legislation to pave the way for ethanol-based jet fuel. While use of such “sustainable” aviation fuel is still in its early stages domestically, corn and biofuel associations have made developing a market for it a top policy priority.
Secchi, the Iowa professor, says it’s easy to see why ethanol producers are trying to expand their market: The growth in electric vehicles threatens long-term gasoline sales.
Researchers warn that producing enough ethanol-based jet fuel could trigger major land-use shifts. A 2024 World Resources Institute analysis found that meeting the federal goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol jet fuel would require about 114 million acres of corn — roughly 20% more corn acreage than the U.S. already plants for all purposes. That surge in demand, the authors concluded, would push up food prices and worsen hunger.
Secchi calls that scenario a climate and land-use “disaster.” Large-scale use of ethanol-based aviation fuel, she said, would mean clearing even more land and pouring on even more nitrogen fertilizer, driving up greenhouse gas emissions.
“The result,” she said, “would be essentially to enshrine this dysfunctional system that we created.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
Rob-n-Cin farms has expanded to become a concentrated animal feeding operation. Environmental groups and local residents have filed a petition against the DNR's decision to grant the farm a wastewater discharge permit. (Photo by Darren Hauck/Getty Images)
Two environmental groups filed a petition late last month challenging the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ decision to grant a permit allowing a West Bend dairy farm to operate as a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).
The dairy, Rob-n-Cin Farms, has been operating as a CAFO for several years without a permit. Under state law, CAFOs are required to obtain Wisconsin Pollution Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permits, which regulate the pollution industrial activities such as factory farms are allowed to discharge into local waterways.
CAFOs are industrial farming facilities with more than 1,000 animal units — one animal unit is equivalent to a 1,000-pound cow. Rob-n-Cin plans to expand its herd from 1,300 cows to 2,000. After expanding, the herd will produce more than 18 million gallons of manure every year which the farm plans to spread on fields in Ozaukee and Washington counties.
In 2023, the DNR investigated the farm for operating as an unpermitted CAFO and issued a notice of noncompliance against the farm.
Since then, Rob-n-Cin has been going through the process to obtain a permit, drawing complaints from local residents and community groups. Those complaints include the farm’s failure to list two satellite locations where it plans to spread manure in its permit application, the lack of sanctions on the farm for operating unpermitted and the effect on local groundwater.
Residents are worried about the farm’s effects on the Milwaukee River watershed and the Cedarburg Bog, which is protected as a state natural area and national natural landmark.
On Nov. 26, the environmental-focused law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a petition for a contested case review of the DNR’s permit approval on behalf of Milwaukee Riverkeeper and area residents. The residents include a nearby organic farm and neighbors of Rob-n-Cin.
The petition alleges that the DNR has not proven the expansion will comply with the state’s groundwater quality standards, particularly the limits for phosphorus and nitrates. The permit includes statements that the farm will follow statewide best practices for manure spreading but the petition argues that’s not enough and the DNR should have done more to prove the groundwater will be protected.
“DNR’s issuance of a permit relying solely on standard practices that are not intended to ensure compliance with groundwater quality standards is unreasonable,” the petition states. “This is particularly true in an area of high susceptibility where many members of the public raised credible concerns of groundwater contamination and examples of excessive nitrate levels. Rob-n-Cin needed to demonstrate, and DNR needed to find, that issuance of a permit would not lead to continued or widespread groundwater contamination in excess of established standards. Simply relying on default nutrient management practices without performing analysis or investigation was unreasonable.”
The petition also argues the DNR should require monitoring of the local groundwater after the expansion is complete, stating that state regulators can’t know if the farm is violating its standards if it isn’t tracking how the expansion affects the groundwater.
And the petition states that the DNR did not complete a sufficient environmental review before approving the permit.
“DNR conducted no substantive evaluation of environmental or socioeconomic impacts of the WPDES permit, including effects on groundwater, Cedar Creek, Mole Creek (a Class II trout stream), the Milwaukee River watershed, which is subject to an EPA-approved [Total Maximum Daily Load] for nutrients and sediment, or the Cedarburg Bog,” the petition states.
In a news release, MEA attorney Adam Voskuil said the DNR’s authority requires it to prove that the expansion won’t violate state water standards and it has failed to do so.
“State law is clear that the DNR is required to affirmatively determine — not merely assume — that Rob-n-Cin’s manure-spreading plan will not violate groundwater quality standards. Without off-site groundwater monitoring, there’s simply no way to obtain the data necessary to make that determination,” Voskuil said.
If the petition for a contested case hearing is granted, a hearing on the permit approval will be held by an administrative law judge. That decision would be appealable to the state circuit court system.
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A store displays a sign accepting Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program purchases for groceries on Oct. 30, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin next week to block nutrition assistance funding for states led by Democrats that have not provided data on fraud in the program, Secretary Brooke Rollins told President Donald Trump at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
USDA sought data from states earlier this year related to their administration of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, Rollins said Tuesday. She added the data was needed to address fraud that she called “rampant” in the program that helps 42 million people afford groceries.
Most states complied with the request, but 21, mostly run by Democrats, refused, she said. A USDA spokesperson later implied the department was missing data from 22 states.
“As of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply, and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said.
A USDA spokesperson in an email listed 28 states, plus one territory, from which they said the department has received data.
That would leave the following 22 states, all led by Democratic governors, that have not provided data: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.
The spokesperson provided some additional details of the initiative, including that the department was targeting administrative funds, and that the next step would be a formal warning.
Blue states sought to protect bad actors, including criminals and immigrants in the country without legal status, “over the American taxpayer,” the statement said.
“We have sent Democrat States yet another request for data, and if they fail to comply, they will be provided with formal warning that USDA will pull their administrative funds,” the spokesperson said.
Court records show the department sent the states a new request for data on Nov. 28, and asked for a response within seven days, which would be Friday.
The letter was reproduced as part of a suit the 22 states have brought against the administration over the request for SNAP recipients’ data.
It’s unclear what authority Rollins would have to block funding, which Congress has appropriated.
The federal government pays for all benefits for SNAP, which was formerly known as food stamps. It splits the administrative costs with states.
The USDA spokesperson did not answer a direct question about the legal authority for withholding funds.
Democrats on the U.S. House Agriculture Committee said any effort to block SNAP funding would be illegal.
“Yet again, Trump and Rollins are illegally threatening to withhold federal dollars,” a social media post from an official account of committee Democrats read. “SNAP has one of the lowest fraud rates of any government program, but Trump continues to weaponize hunger.”
The committee’s lead Democrat, Angie Craig of Minnesota, issued her own statement that also accused the administration of “weaponizing hunger” and said Rollins “continues to spew propaganda.”
“Her disregard for the law and willingness to lie through her teeth comes from the very top – the Trump administration is as corrupt as it is lawless, and I will not sit silently as she carries out the president’s campaign against Americans struggling to afford food in part because of this president’s tariffs and disastrous economic policies.”
The data USDA has sought from states includes verification of SNAP recipients’ eligibility, along with a host of personal information such as Social Security numbers.
An early USDA review of data provided by the 28 states and Guam “indicates an estimated average of $24 million dollars per day of federal funds is lost to fraud and errors undetected by States in their administration of SNAP,” the department said in the Nov. 28 letter.
Preventing those losses could save up to $9 billion per year, the letter added.
But the types of fraud cited in some of the public statements from Rollins and the department are rare, existing data show.
A 2023 USDA report showed about 26,000 applications, roughly 0.1% of the households enrolled in SNAP, were referred for an administrative or criminal review.
People in the country illegally have never been authorized to receive SNAP benefits.
“The long-standing data sources indicate that intentional fraud by participants is rare,” Katie Bergh, a senior food assistance policy analyst for the left-leaning think tank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said in a November interview.
SNAP has been a consistent target for cuts during Trump’s second presidency.
The issue was a focal point during the six-week government shutdown, during which the administration reversed itself often but generally resisted calls — from states, advocates, lawmakers and federal judges — to fund food assistance.
Shortly after the government reopened, Rollins in television interviews said she would force all recipients to reapply for benefits, a proposal seen as logistically challenging by program experts.
And the Republican taxes and spending law passed by Congress and signed by Trump earlier this year included new work requirements and other restrictions on SNAP eligibility that advocates say will lead to major drops in benefits.
The law will also make states pay for some share of benefits and increase the share of administrative costs that states are responsible for, potentially leading some states to cut benefits.
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