August 22, 2025 – The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates emissions from the agriculture sector—a key driver of climate change—will modestly increase over the next 30 years.
The amount of the increase will vary, depending on demand and technological innovations, the CBO says in a report issued earlier this week, but the analysis estimates that emissions will increase by about a quarter of a percent annually.
Agriculture contributes to about 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the U.S. remains one of the top greenhouse gas emitters in the world. Its agricultural emissions are generally split between crop production and livestock, with about eight percent of total sector emissions attributed to the fuel used in farm vehicles, machinery, and other equipment.
Agriculture is the largest source of nitrous oxide emissions and the second largest contributor of methane emissions in the country, according to the CBO report.
In fact, the CBO report found that agriculture accounted for over four times as much nitrous oxide emissions as the industrial, commercial, electric power, transportation and residential sectors combined. This is largely due to soil management practices, especially fertilization in crop production.
Since 1990, the CBO found, agriculture’s emissions have slightly increased, but not at the same pace as production. Milk production and field-crop harvests have risen by over 50 percent since 1990, and meat production has skyrocketed by about 75 percent. In that same period, emissions from the sector have gone up by 7 percent.
The discrepancy between the rate of production and emission increases could be attributed to innovations like more precise fertilizer and feed management, according to the report.
The office expects agricultural emissions to continue at a similar pace and gradually increase over the next three decades. But this is dependent on the demand for greater or less agricultural production as well as continued innovation in technology. Emissions could trend lower if the demand for production is lower than expected, or if technologies under development are introduced and widely adopted.
“But it is uncertain how rapidly that would occur or how effective the new technologies would be,” the CBO wrote in the report.
U.S. Department of Agriculture programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program incentivize or support farmers in adopting some of the technological innovations mentioned in the CBO report. However, since the beginning of the Trump administration, which does not support climate initiatives, farmers have run into funding pauses from these and other conservation programs.
This report and other analyses on industry emissions set a baseline the CBO can use to predict how future emissions policies, like setting a price on emissions, would impact the federal budget. But it does not make direct estimates about the budgetary impact of expected emission trends. (Link to this post.)
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