Rural and Environmental Advocates Gather in Washington to End Factory Farm Gas

Blog| July 24, 2024

Rural and Environmental Advocates Gather in Washington to End Factory Farm Gas

byHannah Tremblay

Our food belongs in the hands of many

Last month, a group of 37 environmental and farming advocates from 25 organizations around the country, including Farm Aid, traveled to Washington, D.C. to deliver a message to policymakers: the government must stop funding factory farm gas. The group held a rally outside of the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calling for lawmakers to stop incentivizing factory farm gas production before heading to Capitol Hill to meet with legislators.

Organizers and advocates shared testimony with members of Congress and federal agencies, including EPA, U.S. Treasury Department and USDA. They detailed how factory farms (also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs) and methane digesters (the technology used to produce factory farm gas) have affected their communities. Advocates asked lawmakers to support the EQIP Improvement Act, which would eliminate wasteful federal spending on these systems and prioritize conservation practices with greater environmental benefits, and for the Farm Systems Reform Act, which would invest in a just transition away from the factory farm system.

Despite the fact that methane digesters are an ineffective way of reducing emissions and creating energy, they are proliferating rapidly. Federal funding for this technology, in the form of tax breaks and other financial incentives, has led to an increase of CAFOs in rural areas. These factory farms are deeply damaging to surrounding communities and the environment. Taxpayer dollars would be better spent on investments in forms of energy that are actually clean and renewable (like wind and solar) and that don't further entrench industrial agriculture and fossil fuel infrastructure. And because farms must be large, industrial-scale operations in order to build a methane digester, they are, as one factory farm organizer testified, "a solution looking for a problem."

Life Near Factory Farms

Over the course of two days and many meetings with elected officials, advocates shared stories and their experiences living near CAFOs with methane digesters. Many described frustration and concern about the blatant lack of regulation they have witnessed at factory farm gas facilities. Advocates have had to document and report environmental violations, like waste dumping and gas flaring, to state environmental offices themselves due to lack of routine inspections or hands-on government oversight of these operations. The groups also spoke to the dangers posed by "co-digesters," which combine industrial and animal waste, lack sufficient regulatory oversight and result in even larger amounts of pollution than standard manure digesters.

Vicki Gehrke, a Socially Responsible Agriculture Project community member from Wisconsin explained, "Because [methane digesters] are being located on industrial livestock operations, they are often not regulated or are regulated under agricultural regulations rather than under industrial waste and industrial wastewater regulations, which are much more stringent than agricultural regulations. The digestate (the by-product of the methane digester) in both liquid and solid forms is much more dangerous to soil and water due to the increased concentration of nutrients and increased water solubility. Additionally, when co-digestors are utilized, there is increased risk of forever chemicals, heavy metals, antibiotic resistance bacteria, and endocrine changing hormones to be present in the digestate."

Tonya Bonitatibus of Savannah Riverkeeper underlined this issue when she described the way these facilities have operated in her Georgia community. "There's no permitting required, there are zero community benefits agreements and the tax credits that these operations receive mean that the community is not benefiting in any way."

Factory farm gas facilities and the extensive build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure that comes with them impact the ability of rural community members to lead healthy lives and turn communities into sacrifice zones. Sherri White-Williamson of Environmental Justice Community Action Network is from Sampson County, North Carolina, the largest turkey producer in the state and second-largest hog producer in the country. Sampson County struggles with documented pollution of PFAS (or "forever chemicals") and a large concentration of CAFOs as well as processing plants and factory farm gas facilities - all of which have had a cumulative, negative impact on the community.

Another frustration voiced was the exploitation of funding by the companies who build digesters and receive tax breaks, in some cases creating multiple LLCs to maximize financial gain. While owners of these facilities see major earnings, surrounding rural communities do not see any benefits like jobs or local tax revenue. On the contrary, local residents near these operations often see their home values and quality of life drop once a CAFO moves in.

Lynn Henning, another SRAP community member, has watched as CAFOs and a digester have sprung up near her family's farm in Lenawee County, Michigan. Her in-laws were diagnosed with hydrogen sulfide poisoning and her husband has had to have quadruple bypass surgery because of exposure to air pollution. Lynn described the headaches, nausea and vomiting caused by the noxious gasses emitted by CAFOs and from the animal waste spread on the fields surrounding her home. Her family and community have been impacted by the truck traffic and water pollution caused by the CAFOs. "Here we are," she told the Senate Agriculture Committee staffer, pointing to her home on a map, surrounded by a dozen red dots, each indicating the location of a CAFO and surrounding fields where animal waste is spread. "We can't go outside sometimes, the emissions are so bad."

Meanwhile, I shared concerns that Farm Aid has heard on our hotline that methane digesters are only benefiting mega dairies and are leading to larger herd sizes on dairy farms, further consolidating an already struggling industry and leaving small farmers behind and even less able to compete.

"Fundamentally, methane digesters don't solve any problems inherent to CAFOs," said Chris Hunt, deputy director of SRAP. "It's not a solution; it's propping up these two problematic industries [industrial animal agriculture and fossil fuels]."

Here's the bottom line: rural communities are not asking for CAFOs and methane digesters to be built in their backyards, but they suffer the negative effects caused by these industries.

Farm Aid and other farm and rural organizations will keep working to gather Congressional support for the EQIP Improvement Act, and Farm Systems Reform Act. We want to see them included in the next farm bill. We hope that legislators take our concerns about the dangers of methane digesters seriously enough to stop funding them. These rural communities depend on it.

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