New Mexico is at risk for a factory farm biogas bonanza. The Clean Transportation Fuel Program (CTFP) is supposed to provide a pathway towards clean energy — but as proposed, the program could instead incentivize factory farms to expand and pollute even more in New Mexico.
Home to some of the largest herd sizes in the country (touting a whopping average of 3,600 cows), New Mexico’s factory farms emit massive amounts of pollution and drive small farms out of business. They also use vast amounts of water, while our state is experiencing a decades-long megadrought. The CTFP threatens to worsen these problems.
CTFP Could Incentivize Dirty Factory Farm Biogas
While New Mexico is rapidly losing water and family-scale farms, our state agencies are working on a program that would only further enrich and entrench factory farms. This program is the Clean Transportation Fuel Program, in which producers of “clean” fuels can benefit from a credit system.
The legislature’s passage of HB41 in 2024 authorized the CTFP and kicked off a rulemaking to detail how the program will work. These rules will establish a statewide carbon intensity (CI) standard, dictating the amount of credits or deficits to assign different types of fuels and creating a marketplace where fuel producers can buy, sell, and trade these credits.
A fuel’s CI value is meant to be a representation of a fuel’s overall carbon footprint. The lower a fuel’s rating, the more incentive there is to produce it — and the more profit a company can make from selling credits in the marketplace.
Similar to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), a central feature of the New Mexico program will be how different fuels are assigned carbon intensity values. In its rulemaking, the New Mexico Environment Improvement Board is considering a backward policy from the LCFS known as “avoided methane crediting.”
This results in massively negative carbon intensity values only for factory farm biogas, allowing it to generate more credits than any other alternative fuel, including truly renewable options like solar. This gives this dirty fuel a leg up and an unfair advantage.
Mega-dairy Waste is Already a Problem. CTFP Could Make It Worse.
To create factory farm biogas, manure is placed into a digester where bacteria break down the waste to produce methane. And there are serious issues with this process.
New Mexico’s mega-dairies produce 11.5 billion pounds of manure annually — four times as much as the state’s human population. Digesters won’t eliminate or even reduce the amount of waste produced by the state’s factory farms. Better manure management practices can help this, but only an end to industrialized agriculture altogether will truly help the waste problem.
With CTFP’s perverse incentives, we can expect more factory farm waste, not less. The program incentivizes larger factory farms and digesters that turn the waste from these polluting facilities into biogas. The more cows a facility has, the more biogas credits it can generate, and the more money it can make selling credits in the program.
With the CTFP, there isn’t just a risk of larger dairies — there’s also a risk of dairies switching to more methane-polluting manure management systems. Currently, most New Mexico dairies are dry lot operations — confining cows on barren soil that becomes a “mashed mess of urine and manure.”
This type of manure management is not ideal for digestion or the capture of biogas. However, slurrying, or the adding of water to waste in digesters to increase methane production, is.
And that is where the risk comes. If there’s financial incentive to capture biogas, then there’s incentive to change manure management practices to increase emissions and profit from avoided methane crediting.
Don’t Let Boosters Fool You — Factory Farm Biogas is Dirty Energy
Biogas boosters claim it’s a clean fuel because it turns waste into energy. But biogas is not clean or climate-friendly. Methane fuel derived from factory farm biogas is chemically indistinguishable from the methane in fracked gas, and it still pollutes the air and the climate when burned.
This is nothing to say of the actual emissions from the factory farms themselves, as biogas doesn’t address the second-largest source of methane pollution in the US — the methane released by enteric fermentation (cow burps and farts).
Additionally, factory farms emit air pollutants, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Factory farm biogas construction and production also bring their own toxins — from the exhaust generated from heavy equipment and vehicles, to potential odors that come with the transport of manure and other material used for digestion.
Water quality problems from factory farms are also well-documented. Manure lagoons can leak, and waste sprayed onto fields can run off in the rain, contaminating surface and groundwater.
Digesters don’t solve harmful nitrate contamination, either. Gas production creates liquid waste with higher concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, which factory farms typically “dispose of” by applying to land. This effluent can leach into soil or water.
All these problems may grow and worsen with CTFP. We’ve already seen the consequences of California’s LCFS — in just a few years, the program has led to bigger herd sizes and more dangerous pollution for neighboring communities.
The CTFP Could Encourage Climate-Wrecking Factory Farms
Methane emissions from New Mexico’s mega-dairies totalled about 106,000 metric tons in 2022. That’s the equivalent of 2.2 million cars driving for a year. CTFP will not solve this problem and may even make it worse.
We have seen this play out in California’s LCFS. Last year, we mapped manure methane plumes over dairies that feed into the LCFS. We found over a dozen dairies continued to emit methane at alarming rates even after digester construction.
There is no need for these emissions levels in the first place. Farms raising fewer cows sustainably, on-pasture, generate negligible methane from manure and far less methane from enteric fermentation.
But since smaller, more sustainable farms don’t have massive climate emissions to begin with, they can’t claim the lucrative avoided methane credits available to the big polluters. Factory farms, meanwhile, produce massive emissions and are rewarded with lucrative payouts for “capturing” them.
The CTFP Could Worsen New Mexico’s Water Crisis
Expanding mega-dairies under CTFP would also threaten our water supplies during a decades-long historic megadrought. Right now, the state’s mega-dairies consume about 32 million gallons of water a day.
This water is sourced from both surface and groundwater, consuming more than 11.7 billion gallons annually. The state is already seeing growing herd sizes without the CTFP, and these facilities are using more water every year.
Factory farms are also polluting our precious groundwater resources. Dairies currently account for 20% of the state’s groundwater discharge permits, and nearly all dairies in New Mexico either have or are seeking these permits.
Groundwater below the dairies in an area of Doña Ana County known as “dairy row” already contains high levels of contaminants, including nitrate and chloride. The pollution will only worsen if mega-dairies get bigger or start producing factory farm biogas in New Mexico.
NMED Must Stop The CTFP From Enriching and Entrenching Factory Farms in New Mexico
Factory farms are already growing in New Mexico, while draining communities dry and polluting them in the process. The same industry that has crowded out small family farms will get an even greater leg up. Digester technology does not help small farmers. Factory farm biogas will only help the biggest factory farms get bigger, further enriching them in the process.
Moreover, decades of research uphold that factory farms “are fundamentally incompatible with rural regional economic development,” linked to higher levels of unemployment and poverty. New Mexico’s mega-dairies already take advantage of our state at every opportunity. With the incentives the CTFP may provide, they could continue to profit at our expense.
New Mexico regulators must act now. The New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) must stop the CTFP from incentivizing factory farms to get bigger, like we’ve seen in California. NMED must remove avoided methane crediting from the program before it’s too late.
Join our fight against the CTFP and dirty mega-dairies! Tell state regulators not to incentivize the enrichment and entrenchment of factory farms in New Mexico.