Groups focusing on the environment and small farms are praising a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pause and review funding for systems that produce natural gas from manure at industrial livestock operations.
The move comes just a week after a coalition filed a petition asking that factory farms be ineligible for funding for anaerobic digesters under the Rural Energy for America Program. The EPA database lists one anaerobic digester in Arkansas, near Springdale.
Tyler Lobdell, senior staff attorney for the non-profit Food and Water Watch, said factory farm biogas digesters do produce energy but carry high environmental costs.
“They increase water and air pollution, and they encourage factory farms to get bigger, which increases the overall pollution load that a rural community has to deal with,” Lobdell explained. “We are adding industrial gas production on top of these already very large and pretty industrialized facilities.”
In a statement, the Renewable Natural Gas Coalition said the digesters “reduce methane emissions from manure management, improve water and air quality, enable production of renewable natural gas, and support grid reliability.”
Lobdell argued the limited program funds would be better spent on projects like solar arrays on small farms, which do not produce enough manure to merit a multimillion-dollar digester.
“This type of gas production adds yet another market lever against small-scale local farming and in favor of multinational, ‘Big Ag’ corporations having further consolidation in our ag system,” Lobdell contended.
There is also a prototype digester at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, which transforms waste into fertilizer and captures methane.