In late January, the director of digital communications at the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent an email to staff instructing them to remove agency web pages related to climate change by the end of the following day.

The lawsuit says the Agriculture Department is hindering farmers from using the data to make “agricultural decisions” while they also face a recent funding freeze.

Farmers and green groups sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday for an “unlawful purge” of climate data from its website.  “This lawsuit challenges the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s

The Department of Agriculture ordered staff shortly after Trump returned to power to rank webpages by how heavily they focused on climate change.

The data, which disappeared from Agriculture Department sites in recent weeks, was useful to farmers for business planning, the lawsuit said.

Farmers and environmental groups have sued the Agriculture Department after it removed references to climate change from its websites and froze funding.

Climate defenders and farmers sued the Trump administration in federal court on Monday over "the U.S. Department of Agriculture's unlawful purge of climate-related policies, guides, datasets, and resources from its websites.