Biden’s Agriculture Department forced American dairy farmers into a United Nations climate scheme using their mandatory dues.
Those farmers just won the fight of their lives and they did it without a single vote in Washington.
Brooke Rollins just ended the program that forced them to pay – and what she found inside it is worse than anyone thought.
How Biden Used the Dairy Checkoff to Fund a Net Zero Mandate
The dairy checkoff program started as something simple.
Farmers pay a mandatory 15 cents for every hundred pounds of milk they produce.
That money was supposed to fund milk promotion, research, and nutrition education – the kind of thing that puts "Got Milk?" on a billboard, not UN climate pledges.
Then Biden’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack showed up at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021 and committed American dairy farmers – without their vote, without their consent – to a global initiative called Pathways to Dairy Net Zero.
P2DNZ was marketed as "voluntary" and "science-based."
Heartland Impact and Consumers Defense revealed the mechanism: once a net-zero commitment is in place, banks, processors, and purchasers build it into their contract terms – and farmers who refuse lose their markets.
Cargill, Coca-Cola, Land O'Lakes, and Starbucks are among the major corporations listed as participants.
The structure is the same playbook used to squeeze global banks and pension funds into net-zero compliance without a single vote cast.
And it was all running on mandatory farmer checkoff dollars.
The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy – funded by the checkoff – buried farmers in ESG initiatives: Scope 3 greenhouse gas accounting, the Greener Cattle Initiative, the U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative, the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management Environmental Stewardship program, and more.
Scope 3 alone required farmers to audit and report emissions all the way through their suppliers' supply chains.
All of it mandatory – none of it voted on by the farmers paying for it.
Meanwhile, 1,036 dairy farms shut their gates last year.
Three Wisconsin Dairy Farmers Sued USDA Over Mandatory ESG Fees and Won
Abby Swan, Adam Faust, and Christopher Baird weren't waiting for permission.
These three Wisconsin dairy farmers filed a federal lawsuit in June 2026 against USDA and the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board.
Their argument was simple: the 1983 Dairy Production Stabilization Act authorized checkoff funds for promotion, research, and nutrition education – not bankrolling a UN-backed climate network run by foreign organizations.
WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek said the checkoff had become "a clear example of unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucrats" destroying the farms they were supposed to serve.
They were right.
On September 17, 2026, Secretary Rollins sent a letter to National Dairy Board Chair Lolly Lesher and ended the entire scheme.
Rollins terminated the Scope 3 accounting requirements, Pathways to Dairy Net Zero, the Greener Cattle Initiative, and every ESG scorecard, pledge, and reporting mandate funded by farmer dollars.
The National Dairy Board had until September 30 to submit full termination plans for every flagged program.
Dairy Management Inc. said it would comply.
Then Rollins went further – directing the Agricultural Marketing Service to audit all 22 commodity checkoff programs for the same ESG contamination.
U.S. Dairy Emissions Are Just Tenths of One Percent of Global Greenhouse Gases
Vilsack and Biden built a war on American farmers and called it climate science.
Wipe out every dairy farm in America and global greenhouse gas emissions drop by a few tenths of one percent.
That's it.
And to achieve even that irrelevant number, globalists in boardrooms were running mandatory net-zero compliance programs through American farmers' own dues, squeezing them with Scope 3 accounting and 2050 stewardship goals while family farms went under.
Rollins called it "the bigger war on cattle."
"We've got to root all this corruption and darkness out," she told The Daily Wire.
The same review is already underway across all 22 commodity checkoff programs.
That ESG rot runs through every one of them.
When the Dairy Production Stabilization Act was written in 1983, nobody imagined checkoff dollars would end up underwriting an international climate network with foreign organizations writing compliance rules for American farms.
Biden's USDA made that happen – and Rollins just shut it down.
Sources:
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, "USDA Ends Mandatory Farmer Funding of ESG Commitments in Dairy Checkoff," USDA Press Release, September 17, 2026.
- Mary Margaret Olohan, "Exclusive: Trump Admin Frees Dairy Farmers from Funding Woke Climate Initiatives," The Daily Wire, September 17, 2026.
- Samantha Fillmore, "Secretary Brooke Rollins Shepherds Another Anti-ESG Reform for USDA," RealClearEnergy, October 9, 2026.
- Fred Lucas, "Exclusive: Trump USDA Faces Calls to Exit Climate Initiative Critics Call 'Private Regulation'," The Daily Signal, September 3, 2026.
- Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, "USDA Cuts Checkoff Funding for Dairy ESG Projects," Dairy Herd, September 17, 2026.