The hundreds of billions of pounds of waste produced by America’s dairy cows every year has long been a headache for farmers.

Manure is expensive to manage and, to state the obvious, it smells terrible, which can lead to complaints, protests, and lawsuits from neighbors — even the occasional fine or misdemeanor charge. And when dairies store their manure in giant open-air lagoons, the most common and cheapest method, it becomes a climate problem: As the manure decomposes, it produces methane, a climate “super pollutant” that accelerates climate change at a much faster rate than carbon dioxide.

But in recent years, a growing number of large dairy operations have managed to simultaneously turn their costly, burdensome manure into money, and their climate problem into a supposed climate solution.

This is the first in a series of stories on how factory farming has shaped, and continues to impact, the US Midwest. You can visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for future installments and more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

This alchemy relies on a machine called a biodigester, which usually comes in the form of a massive tank that holds manure, or as a seal that covers the lagoons where dairy farms store manure. As bacteria breaks down the manure and generates methane, biodigesters trap it — and other gases — to produce what’s known as “biogas.” Like fossil fuel-derived natural gas, biogas can be used to fuel cars and trucks, generate electricity, or heat homes and businesses.

The narrative that these simple machines can get rid of methane and turn manure into a climate solution, all while providing farmers a new revenue stream through the sale of the gas, has proven compelling across the political and corporate spectrum. A broad coalition of livestock groups, fossil fuel giants, agriculture and environment regulators, utility companies, Republicans and Democrats, and a handful of environmental groups has coalesced to hail manure biogas as a win-win, untapped source of renewable energy.

Cutting methane emissions, which account for 12 percent of US climate emissions, is a crucial component of the country’s efforts to slow down global warming. The Biden administration has designated manure biodigesters as a key part of its agricultural methane strategy.

To harness biogas’s potential, a sprawling web of generous federal and state grants, tax credits, technical assistance programs, and loan guarantees have been developed to build out biodigester infrastructure. There’s also a federal program, along with numerous state programs and private markets, that issue valuable credits to dairy producers and energy companies for biogas.

But while manure biodigesters do provide some benefit by trapping methane that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere — and reducing farm odor — to many in the environmental community, they represent an insidious form of greenwashing. A coalition of environmental, public health, and agriculture groups, with backing from some members of Congress, has formed to push back against the rise of biogas — what they have renamed “factory farm gas” — arguing that its win-win narrative is too good to be true.

Biodigester critics say that, at best, the process is a costly and inefficient use of America’s precious climate funding.

They often point to analyses by University of California, Berkeley agricultural economist Aaron Smith, who in 2023 estimated that it costs $1,130 per cow per year to build and operate a biodigester that generates just $128 worth of gas per cow.

“These things are really expensive — the cost of constructing and operating biodigesters is 10 times the value of the gas that it produces, and so it’s a very inefficient way to produce gas,” Smith told me. “There’s no way that you would ever justify that on economic grounds, so the only way to justify it is if it’s really valuable to society to reduce those methane emissions, and stop them from escaping.”

Stopping that methane is valuable to society, but with manure biodigesters, the costs may outweigh the benefits.

In a new report, anti-factory farming nonprofit Farm Forward found that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, funneled over $150 million in subsidies to manure biogas projects in 2023 alone, primarily through grants under the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) and valuable tax breaks.

Hundreds of millions of additional IRA dollars could be dished out to manure biogas projects over the next few years, according to Farm Forward. After the passage of the IRA, the American Biogas Council welcomed its potential to “fuel growth of the biogas and clean energy industries for years to come.” Hundreds of millions of dollars have also been granted by California, which has the most extensive biogas program in the US.

At worst, critics say, manure biogas further enriches, entrenches, and expands a brutal factory farm system by incentivizing dairy farms to grow herd sizes in order to produce more manure and thus receive more lucrative federal and state credits from the gas that these “cash cows” generate. That’s at odds with the consensus among climate scientists, who warn that rich countries like the US must drastically reduce livestock populations — particularly cattle — to meet global warming targets.

It has also created a new revenue stream for oil and gas giants, such as Chevron, BP, and Shell, who have invested in biogas projects and sell it under the guise of renewable energy.

Biogas may seem renewable on its face; so long as people consume dairy, cows will keep generating manure. But this marketing sleight of hand belies two fundamental aspects of US dairy production. The first is that cow manure on its own doesn’t naturally contain methane; rather, the way that large dairy operations store manure produces the potent greenhouse gas, despite low-methane alternative storage methods. Second, the US has long had an oversupply of milk; we could meet dairy demand with fewer methane-generating cows.

“Our sense is that the IRA is being perverted to entrench Big Oil and Big Ag — that the incentives of the IRA are doing real harm, both, I think, for the climate movement and certainly for........

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