The tons of of billions of kilos of waste produced by America’s dairy cows yearly has lengthy been a headache for farmers.
Manure is pricey to handle and, to state the plain, it smells horrible, which might result in complaints, protests, and lawsuits from neighbors — even the occasional high quality or misdemeanor cost. And when dairies retailer their manure in big open-air lagoons, the commonest and least expensive technique, it turns into a local weather drawback: Because the manure decomposes, it produces methane, a local weather “tremendous pollutant” that accelerates local weather change at a a lot sooner charge than carbon dioxide.
However in recent times, a rising variety of giant dairy operations have managed to concurrently flip their pricey, burdensome manure into cash, and their local weather drawback right into a supposed local weather resolution.
That is the primary in a sequence of tales on how manufacturing facility farming has formed, and continues to impression, the US Midwest. You possibly can go to Vox’s Future Good part for future installments and extra protection of Huge Ag. The tales on this sequence are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which acquired a grant from Builders Initiative.
This alchemy depends on a machine referred to as a biodigester, which normally comes within the type of an enormous tank that holds manure, or as a seal that covers the lagoons the place dairy farms retailer manure. As micro organism breaks down the manure and generates methane, biodigesters lure it — and different gases — to supply what’s generally known as “biogas.” Like fossil fuel-derived pure fuel, biogas can be utilized to gas automobiles and vans, generate electrical energy, or warmth houses and companies.
The narrative that these easy machines can eliminate methane and switch manure right into a local weather resolution, all whereas offering farmers a brand new income stream by the sale of the fuel, has confirmed compelling throughout the political and company spectrum. A broad coalition of livestock teams, fossil gas giants, agriculture and surroundings regulators, utility corporations, Republicans and Democrats, and a handful of environmental teams has coalesced to hail manure biogas as a win-win, untapped supply of renewable vitality.
Slicing methane emissions, which account for 12 % of US local weather emissions, is a vital element of the nation’s efforts to decelerate international warming. The Biden administration has designated manure biodigesters as a key a part of its agricultural methane technique.
To harness biogas’s potential, a sprawling net of beneficiant federal and state grants, tax credit, technical help packages, and mortgage ensures have been developed to construct out biodigester infrastructure. There’s additionally a federal program, together with quite a few state packages and personal markets, that situation useful credit to dairy producers and vitality corporations for biogas.
However whereas manure biodigesters do present some profit by trapping methane that will in any other case find yourself within the environment — and lowering farm odor — to many within the environmental neighborhood, they symbolize an insidious type of greenwashing. A coalition of environmental, public well being, and agriculture teams, with backing from some members of Congress, has shaped to push again in opposition to the rise of biogas — what they’ve renamed “manufacturing facility farm fuel” — arguing that its win-win narrative is just too good to be true.
Biodigester critics say that, at greatest, the method is a pricey and inefficient use of America’s valuable local weather funding.
They usually level to analyses by College of California, Berkeley agricultural economist Aaron Smith, who in 2023 estimated that it prices $1,130 per cow per 12 months to construct and function a biodigester that generates simply $128 price of fuel per cow.
“These items are actually costly — the price of developing and working biodigesters is 10 instances the worth of the fuel that it produces, and so it’s a really inefficient solution to produce fuel,” Smith advised me. “There’s no means that you’d ever justify that on financial grounds, so the one solution to justify it’s if it’s actually useful to society to cut back these methane emissions, and cease them from escaping.”
Stopping that methane is effective to society, however with manure biodigesters, the prices could outweigh the advantages.
In a new report, anti-factory farming nonprofit Farm Ahead discovered that the Inflation Discount Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s landmark local weather laws, funneled over $150 million in subsidies to manure biogas initiatives in 2023 alone, primarily by grants underneath the US Division of Agriculture’s Rural Vitality for America Program (REAP) and useful tax breaks.
A whole bunch of thousands and thousands of extra IRA {dollars} might be dished out to manure biogas initiatives over the subsequent few years, in response to Farm Ahead. After the passage of the IRA, the American Biogas Council welcomed its potential to “gas development of the biogas and clear vitality industries for years to come back.” A whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} have additionally been granted by California, which has essentially the most intensive biogas program within the US.
At worst, critics say, manure biogas additional enriches, entrenches, and expands a brutal manufacturing facility farm system by incentivizing dairy farms to develop herd sizes in an effort to produce extra manure and thus obtain extra profitable federal and state credit from the fuel that these “money cows” generate. That’s at odds with the consensus amongst local weather scientists, who warn that wealthy international locations just like the US should drastically cut back livestock populations — significantly cattle — to satisfy international warming targets.
It has additionally created a brand new income stream for oil and fuel giants, equivalent to Chevron, BP, and Shell, who’ve invested in biogas initiatives and promote it underneath the guise of renewable vitality.
Biogas could seem renewable on its face; as long as individuals devour dairy, cows will preserve producing manure. However this advertising sleight of hand belies two elementary elements of US dairy manufacturing. The primary is that cow manure by itself doesn’t naturally include methane; moderately, the best way that enormous dairy operations retailer manure produces the potent greenhouse fuel, regardless of low-methane different storage strategies. Second, the US has lengthy had an oversupply of milk; we might meet dairy demand with fewer methane-generating cows.
“Our sense is that the IRA is being perverted to entrench Huge Oil and Huge Ag — that the incentives of the IRA are doing actual hurt, each, I feel, for the local weather motion and definitely for efforts to reform and rework industrial animal farming in the direction of extra sustainable, humane types of agriculture,” mentioned Andrew deCoriolis, govt director of Farm Ahead.
Over the subsequent decade, greenhouse fuel emissions are anticipated to say no in each sector besides agriculture, the place emissions are projected to barely improve. As a substitute of incentivizing farmers to develop extra climate-friendly meals or lastly regulating farm air pollution, as some different international locations have begun to do, US policymakers — utilizing funds from the IRA and elsewhere — have doubled down on throwing cash at applied sciences like manure biodigesters. They supply some modest albeit costly short-term environmental advantages, however at the price of additional locking us into the animal manufacturing facility farming mannequin.
“It’s this perpetual mill of handouts,” mentioned Tyler Lobdell, employees lawyer with the nonprofit Meals & Water Watch, “and all of those choices we’re making as we speak are going to make it a lot more durable to cease that gravy prepare down the street.”
How California sparked a “brown rush”
America’s first biodigester was put in on a Minnesota pig farm in 1976, and it remained a distinct segment expertise for many years. However every thing modified round 2018, which marked the beginning of the biogas “brown rush,” because it’s generally referred to as. That 12 months, biogas grew to become extremely useful because of California’s Low Carbon Gas Commonplace (LCFS), a program that requires gasoline and diesel corporations that function within the state to decrease the carbon depth of their transportation fuels.
Right here’s how this system works: California units a goal to cut back the common carbon depth for transportation fuels used within the state, and since gasoline and diesel are so carbon-intensive, the businesses that import and promote them rack up carbon deficits. If you’re an organization making another gas with a decrease carbon rating in comparison with typical fuel and diesel — like a solar energy producer, or a dairy farm with a biodigester — you may earn credit and promote them for a revenue to the gas corporations that want to cut back their carbon depth underneath California’s regulation. A few of the price is handed onto customers on the pump.
Every kind of gas is assigned its personal carbon depth rating, and the decrease the rating, the extra credit an organization can earn from producing that gas. Earlier than 2018, manure biogas’s worth was comparatively low within the LCFS program, so few dairies participated as a result of it wasn’t price the price of putting in and working a biodigester. However then California up to date the way it calculates manure biogas’s carbon depth by contemplating it a supply of “averted methane” — methane that in any other case would’ve escaped into the environment and warmed the planet.
Whereas it’s technically true that manure biodigesters are diverting methane from the environment into fuel tanks, contemplating it a type of averted methane rests on a defective premise. That’s as a result of cow manure doesn’t inherently include methane. Reasonably, most giant dairies retailer manure in lagoons — the most affordable type of manure administration — which produces methane. Dairies with biodigesters aren’t sucking greenhouse gases out of the air, like carbon dioxide elimination initiatives; they’re producing new methane they didn’t must generate within the first place after which trapping it.
However California’s determination to rely manure biogas as averted methane made it far and away essentially the most useful different gas in this system, with a median carbon depth rating of round -300 — a lot decrease than even electrical energy derived from photo voltaic or wind energy, which has a carbon depth rating of zero. Diesel is round 100.
“That coverage determination is what opened the manure gold rush floodgates,” Lobdell mentioned.
From 2020 to 2024, the variety of manure biodigesters nationwide practically doubled from 175 to 343. Whereas most biodigesters have been inbuilt California as a result of it’s the highest dairy-producing state, the credit may be earned by farmers and vitality corporations in any state and bought to gas corporations working in California, with many inbuilt dairy-rich Texas and throughout the Midwest.
In accordance to some vitality wonks, this unleashing of manure biogas has come on the expense of sooner automobile electrification. Biogas accounts for lower than 1 % of vitality utilized in California’s transportation fuels, however has earned 20 % of LCFS credit, requiring important quantities of capital which may have in any other case gone towards electrification initiatives, equivalent to EV charging stations.
Jim Duffy, who previously managed the LCFS program on the California Air Assets Board (CARB), has lambasted the dairy sector’s preferential therapy: “No different trade is handled as if their methane air pollution is of course a part of the baseline after which lavished with giant monetary incentives for merely lowering their very own air pollution.” For instance, much like dairy manure lagoons, rubbish landfills generate methane, however capturing that methane isn’t thought of a type of “averted methane” and is valued at a fraction of manure biogas.
Final month, a gaggle of environmental justice organizations, together with Meals & Water Watch, sued CARB, arguing it had failed to investigate the impression that incentivizing manure biogas, and the ensuing growth of dairy farms that profit from the credit, would have on the surroundings and public well being of close by communities.
This concern — that by making manure so useful California is incentivizing massive dairy farms to get even greater — is on the coronary heart of anti-factory farming advocates’ critique of manure biogas. “Within the Central Valley, we reside close to 90 % of cows in California and a few of the largest dairy operations in the complete world,” María Arévalo of Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio, a plaintiff within the lawsuit, wrote in a press launch. “We increase time and time once more that the circumstances and impacts in our communities are getting worse as dairies are getting greater and dairy digesters are put in.”
Some small-scale analyses bear this out. In line with an evaluation by Associates of the Earth and the Socially Accountable Agriculture Mission, dairy farms with biodigesters in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, elevated their herd sizes to generate extra revenue — extra cows, extra manure, extra useful carbon credit (Disclosure: Final 12 months, my companion labored with Associates of the Earth on a short-term consulting mission unrelated to biogas.)
Primarily based on an evaluation from Iowa newspaper The Gazette, the identical has occurred in Iowa, and Inside Local weather Information discovered that over 20 California dairies in varied phases of biodigester improvement have sought approval to extend herd measurement.
In accordance to Smith, California’s complete dairy cow inhabitants didn’t improve within the years after the 2018 determination. Nonetheless, the state’s herd sizes had been declining for years; the dairy biodigester increase could have simply helped stave off additional decline.
It’s price noting that dairy cow manure accounts for simply 4.4 % of US methane emissions. One other 6.4 % come from dairy cows’ burps, which biodigesters don’t lure. (The remainder of US methane primarily stems from beef cattle, fossil fuels, and landfills.) So if some dairy producers are rising their herd sizes to generate extra biogas, they may inadvertently be worsening the issue by growing methane emissions from cow burps.
Patrick Serfass, govt director of the commerce group American Biogas Council, dismissed the argument that biodigesters incentivize farms to get greater: “I don’t assume anybody’s proven causation,” he advised me. “I feel there is likely to be some correlation.”
It’s additionally potential that some farms get greater as a consequence of biogas incentives and trigger smaller operations, which might’t compete with them on worth, to shutter. If that’s the case, it might exacerbate a long-running pattern of consolidation within the dairy sector — one which the Biden administration has in any other case sought to cease. Additional consolidation would additionally imply extra concentrated air pollution in rural communities, pitting each California’s and the Biden administration’s methane targets in opposition to their environmental justice initiatives.
CARB declined an interview request for this story and declined to touch upon the pending lawsuit. Over e mail, a spokesperson mentioned that the LCFS is “a profitable coverage instrument amongst California’s portfolio of progressive measures to deal with local weather air pollution and enhance air.”
Learn extra Vox protection of how manufacturing facility farming constructed America
On the finish of 2021, one cow might earn about $2,600 per 12 months on common in mixed credit from California’s program and a federal program, a type of double dipping widespread in manure biogas initiatives, whereas one cow’s milk was price about $4,500 per 12 months. That was the trade common — however some farmers mentioned their manure was about as useful, or much more useful, than their milk — a truth that would have inspired some to develop their herds.
Over the previous couple of years, nevertheless, the worth of California’s carbon credit has crashed as a consequence of manure biogas and different different fuels flooding the market. Right now, as a consequence of falling LCFS credit score worth, biogas credit from one cow are price nearer to $1,600 yearly.
However this previous November, California elevated the carbon discount requirement for transportation gas suppliers, a call anticipated to each increase the worth of this system’s credit and make typical gas suppliers extra reliant on different fuels like manure biogas.
In the meantime, some dairy researchers consider the trade’s future lies within the Higher Midwest and Nice Lakes areas, partly because of local weather change — the area has a temperate local weather and plentiful freshwater, not like drought-prone California. Midwest states are additionally actively luring California dairy farmers to their area with guarantees of fewer laws.
The area might be key to the way forward for the biogas trade as properly. Lately, dozens of recent manure biodigesters have been constructed within the Midwest, and quite a few state legislatures there have launched pro-biogas payments.
“They need a brand new market,” mentioned Trevor McCarty, a coverage fellow at Farm Ahead. The brown rush seems to be slowly transferring eastward.
The brown rush strikes eastward
Over the previous couple of years, in response to one other new report by Farm Ahead, the pro-biogas coalition of policymakers, regulators, fossil gas giants, and agribusiness have been busy constructing that new market. The Midwest, with its ample dairy and pig populations and ag-friendly state legislatures, is primed to extremely worth biogas like California and impose few laws on the trade.
In 2021, Iowa handed a invoice that lifts the cap on the variety of animals a farm can home if it has a biodigester, which straight led to elevated herd sizes. In 2023, the EPA co-hosted a convention within the state — sponsored partly by Chevron — to “enhance curiosity about anaerobic digestion’s potential within the area.”
An evaluation by Examine Midwest discovered that in 2022 and 2023, way more federal rural clear vitality funding in Wisconsin went towards biogas initiatives than putting in photo voltaic panels on farms or making vitality effectivity upgrades, bucking this system’s nationwide spending ratios, through which most spending goes to photo voltaic initiatives.
Now, the vitality and agriculture industries are pushing for a slate of pro-biogas payments in Michigan, paving the best way for an expanded manure biogas sector within the state, in response to Farm Ahead.
“It’s a kind of two-prong method,” McCarty advised me. On one finish, the 2 industries are lobbying for a Michigan Senate invoice that will arrange a transportation gas program much like California’s, which McCarty mentioned shall be “very profitable for [industry’s] personal pursuits.” On the opposite finish, the Michigan Farm Bureau, an agriculture foyer group, helps a pair of payments within the state’s Home that will exempt digestate — the stable manure that’s left over from biogas manufacturing, which poses water air pollution dangers — from key laws.
Not one of the payments handed in Michigan’s most up-to-date legislative session, which simply ended. The brand new session begins in a couple of days.
“It’ll be one thing that we’ll look to proceed to iterate on and reintroduce once more subsequent 12 months,” Jane McCurry, govt director of Clear Fuels Michigan — a commerce group that advocates for different transportation fuels — mentioned in regards to the invoice to arrange a Michigan transportation gas program.
Many Michigan environmental teams don’t need manure biogas in this system. Requested if Clear Fuels Michigan would think about advocating for reducing it, McCurry mentioned, “We’re actually dedicated to persevering with to iterate on this coverage. … We’re very a lot open to persevering with to seek out that center floor and compromise.”
Cheryl Ruble, a doctor and volunteer advocate with Michiganders for a Simply Meals System, which has lobbied in opposition to the payments, mentioned the combat over biogas within the proposed clear gas commonplace has been tough.
“The trade has achieved a really, superb job on the advertising finish,” Ruble advised me. “We’re preventing a wonderful and well-financed, well-funded advertising marketing campaign. We’re additionally preventing lots of deep pockets: Huge Vitality, Huge Ag, Huge Waste, Huge Utility, Huge Finance.” The seemingly win-win narrative of manure biogas has been interesting to each political events: Democrats launched the clear gas commonplace invoice, whereas a bipartisan group of lawmakers launched the deregulatory payments.
Various different states are additionally contemplating comparable packages, together with main dairy states New York and Minnesota. Earlier this 12 months, New Mexico — one other high dairy state — handed laws to construct such a program, however it’s not but determined the way it will worth manure biogas.
Regardless of the Michigan payments failing to maneuver this legislative session, some biogas initiatives have managed to seek out assets in Michigan’s state coffers. In October, the state-run Michigan Strategic Fund awarded Chevron and biogas developer BerQ RNG tax-exempt bonds, valued at $100 million and $235 million, respectively, to finance manure biogas initiatives underneath the banner of supporting “small companies.” Wisconsin, Iowa, and different states have issued comparable tax-exempt bonds, which deprive the states of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in tax income.
On high of state-level packages, there are some two dozen federal packages throughout the Departments of Agriculture, Vitality, Treasury, and Environmental Safety accessible to farmers and vitality corporations to construct biodigesters. The Treasury Division can be weighing whether or not electrical energy producers that use manure biogas can obtain clear vitality tax credit. However elevated scrutiny over manure biodigesters, and the potential for the incoming Trump administration to rein in local weather spending, has put a few of the optimism about biogas into query.
Regardless of the shortcomings of California’s determination to worth manure biogas so extremely, there was some logic — nevertheless flawed — to the choice. In 2015, California handed a regulation to considerably cut back methane emissions by 2030, and lots of the state’s emissions come from livestock as a consequence of its massive dairy trade. There was already some biodigester infrastructure constructed within the state, so constructing out extra was an instantly viable choice that already had buy-in from the trade.
In line with the state, by 2019 California’s dairy biodigester program was reducing one-quarter of its dairy methane emissions every year, the equal of taking practically half one million automobiles off the street.
However “if we might utterly shake the Etch-A-Sketch and begin over, I wouldn’t prioritize anaerobic digesters on dairy farms as being the place I might need to make investments some huge cash,” Smith mentioned. “I might need to have lots of analysis and improvement into higher and extra environment friendly methods to deal with manure in order to cut back methane emissions.”
In line with an evaluation by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental assume tank, federal R&D funding to cut back emissions from livestock manure acquired $4 million a 12 months from 2017 to 2021 — that’s solely 3 % of complete agricultural local weather mitigation R&D funding regardless of manure accounting for 13 % of agricultural emissions.
Serfass, from the American Biogas Council, mentioned that given America’s want to cut back methane as rapidly as potential, biodigesters are price it: “I might submit that there’s a really sound scientific argument that spending cash near-term on lowering methane emissions within the close to time period has a really, very excessive worth, subsequently it is likely to be price paying a bit of bit extra” on a recognized resolution like biodigesters.
Lobdell, with Meals & Water Watch, doesn’t dispute the urgency of America’s methane drawback, however argues that incentivizing manure biogas lacks foresight: “The very last thing we should always do is rush into short-term supposed options which can be very predictably locking in long-term, sturdy issues. That’s dangerous coverage.”
One set of prospects for curbing livestock emissions embody feed components, equivalent to Bovaer — a product that when fed to dairy cows day by day can cut back methane from their burps by round 30 % — that are rather more cost-effective in lowering methane than manure biodigesters. It reveals promise, however questions stay about who pays for it and whether or not it might additionally create perverse incentives like biogas.
The federal government might additionally merely pay dairy farmers to boost fewer cows, which some environmental teams say could be cheaper than funding biodigesters and supply the surest solution to cut back each local weather and localized air pollution. Dairy costs and demand are already considerably synthetic; by one estimate, 45 % of dairy manufacturing is sponsored by the US authorities. The Netherlands has begun paying farmers to cease elevating pigs and different livestock to cut back the nation’s nitrogen air pollution.
Alternatively, Denmark is funding a slate of insurance policies to incentivize farmers to develop extra plant-based meals, which have a lot smaller environmental footprints when in comparison with animal-based meals. The nation can even modestly tax livestock emissions beginning in 2030.
The only resolution could be to make the dairy trade cut back its methane nevertheless it sees match, at its personal expense, moderately than depend on growing infusions of taxpayer {dollars} to resolve an issue of its personal making. Manure administration methods through which the manure is stacked in outside mounds and uncovered to oxygen — versus the poop lagoon methods utilized by most industrial dairies — largely keep away from releasing methane.
“There are dairies proper now who shouldn’t have this manure methane drawback,” Lobdell mentioned about farms that use these “dry” administration methods.
Regardless of all the nice arguments in opposition to biogas, for the trade, there’s no restrict to its development potential. By the American Biogas Council’s rely, there are at present 53 manure biogas operations in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, however there’s potential for one more 1,900 or so, and a further tens of hundreds throughout the nation. One main biogas firm mentioned it plans to unfold “like an amoeba.”
“The entire roadmap right here is rarely to simply pollute much less,” Lobdell mentioned. “The long-term street map right here is digesters at each mega dairy, producing as a lot methane as potential to be used in different sectors.”