After a lawsuit, USDA agrees to share climate risk data with farmers
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office last January, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees were reportedly instructed to report and remove all web pages mentioning climate change, including resources used by farmers to prepare for extreme weather. In response, a group of environmental and agricultural nonprofits sued the agency for loss of critical information. In May, just days before a scheduled hearing, the USDA announced it would reinstate its climate web pages. At that point, “we had basically won,” said Peter Lehner, managing attorney for Earthjustice, the nonprofit law firm representing the plaintiffs. But negotiations for a legal settlement continued.
Last week, the Agriculture Department finally settled the lawsuit, agreeing to share the data sets used to power its climate risk viewer and other tools. Even though most of the web pages in question have already been restored, Lehner added, the plaintiffs wanted to ensure that access remained public — a priority that prolonged negotiations.
As part of the settlement, the Agriculture Department agreed to keep its climate risk visualization tool — which contains more than 140 layers and includes wildfire risk maps — online at least until the plaintiffs receive the underlying raw data. That way, Lehner told Grist, if these web pages were taken down at some point in the future, plaintiffs — like the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit — would be able to recreate the climate risk maps.
This is important because the regulation does not guarantee that USDA will retain these digital resources indefinitely. “The government should be able to change its website,” Lehner said. “But they have to do it in certain ways. And if it’s important information, they have to inform the public about it and they have to do it carefully.” (The Justice Department, which represented the USDA in the lawsuit, declined to comment on the settlement.)
In the original complaint, Earthjustice alleged that the USDA’s purge of web pages mentioning climate change violated several federal laws, including the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, which requires federal agencies to provide sufficient notice before changing public access to information tools, and the Freedom of Information Act.
One of the plaintiffs – the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, or NOFA – was particularly interested in web pages related to loans for climate-smart conservation practices. Wes Gillingham, chairman of the NOFA board of directors, told Grist that the organization directs many growers to these resources to help cover the financial cost of implementing more sustainable growing practices.
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However, the settlement doesn’t mean farmers get everything they need from the USDA. Gillingham, a farmer himself, added that he still didn’t know what loan programs for farmers were available under the second Trump administration. “Which loan programs are running or not is a huge question,” he said.
This situation highlights the financial precariousness of many agricultural producers in the United States, at a time when the federal government has slashed financing programs for farmers. And it illustrates the work that farming groups still need to do to protect their livelihoods. Gillingham said he is currently concerned about a future farm bill that could wipe out funding for conservation practices, like those that can help farmers protect soil health.
Lehner acknowledged that farmers were struggling under the Trump administration, which in some ways gave leverage to their lawsuit.
“To be frank, I think the fact that we were representing farmers and others who were saying, ‘Look, this is hurting us. We’re trying to deal with climate change. We’re trying to deal with extreme weather and you’re cutting our legs off,’ that didn’t make them look very good,” he said. “In my opinion, it just made them look stupid and mean. »
Editor’s Note: Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are Grist advertisers. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
