On January 11, the Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it had withdrawn its Grassfed Standard used in livestock and meat marketing due to lack of a clear congressional mandate to maintain it.

At A Greener World, we have long highlighted the major deficiencies in the USDA grassfed label claim (see The Grassfed Primer, page 5). For example, under this standard farmers could confine cattle on dirt feedlots for long periods outside the grass growing season, or use growth hormones and subtherapeutic antibiotics, and still market their beef under the USDA grassfed label claim–just as long as they fed the animals ‘cut grass or forage.’ Yet despite these clear limitations, we recognize the USDA grassfed standard at least provided a minimum baseline in the market.

We therefore believe the removal of the USDA grassfed standard will lead to significant confusion in the marketplace about grassfed label claims, and could allow unscrupulous operations to market meat or dairy products as “grassfed” when their production methods do not even meet the previous low requirements of the USDA standards, potentially eroding consumer trust in all grassfed label claims.