This reporting was produced with support from Renaissance Journalism’s 2025 LaunchPad Fellowship for NextGen Journalists.

Take California’s Highway 5 two hours north of Los Angeles and veer right onto Highway 99. In 50 miles, you’ll reach Pixley, a small town of about 4,000 with one doctor’s office, no grocery store, and nearly 140,000 bovine neighbors. 

It’s only relatively recently that Pixley’s residents became surrounded by the dairy industry; its milking parlours, massive barns, manure lagoons, and now, specialized equipment designed to capture, create, and transport methane gas siphoned from cow waste. 

The equipment, known as a manure digester, is a lynchpin in the state’s plan to address methane pollution and lower what the oil and gas industry refers to as the “carbon intensity” of transportation fuel. Effectuated by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), hundreds of digesters have been built across the state in recent years. Methane is a greenhouse gas that proves far more potent than carbon dioxide in a shorter span of time, so while it dissipates from the atmosphere faster, its warming potential is significant. And California, with its 2045 climate goal of reducing emissions by 85%, incentivizes polluting industries to course-correct before it’s too late. 

Yet the system the state has devised is not only far from perfect, it’s actively harmful, hinging on the overuse and exploitation of land, air, and water in rural, low-income communities like Pixely. This is what local residents want officials to know at the state’s top air quality agency, the California Air Resources Board (CARB): The Golden State’s climate plan engenders environmental injustice for those least able to withstand it. At a time when the U.S. must shift away from the production and use of fuel sources that contribute to the heating of our planet and the destabilizing of our climate system, California is actively pushing for an investment in methane production. 

California is committed to investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the construction of digesters, and as the program scales, Pixley residents are concerned that the dairy industry is only being encouraged to grow its operations instead of growing solutions to the chronic water pollution, lack of transparency, and unabated air quality issues caused by its operations. 

But it’s not just those living in the San Joaquin Valley who have cause for concern.

How ‘advances’ in digester implementation spell trouble for water and other resources

A central component of the policy that underlies the funding of digesters in California,  the LCFS, is opening up the possibility of digester-created methane outside of the state. Methane is produced from various types of waste. For example, industrial farms in Delaware with resulting chicken manure and North Carolina’s hog farms that produce hog waste cash in on California’s LCFS by pumping animal waste methane into a pipeline and shipping it west. Farm-generated methane is mixed with fossil fuels to dilute the “carbon intensity” of fuel sold at the pump, for which producers receive a credit. 

Manure digesters require a constant and significant source of fuel—cow waste—in order to generate methane gas. That’s a problem for residents living near dairies (who are also usually workers at dairies) because the state’s approach actually worsens other types of pollution. 

“California is really influential, but we would say probably in a bad way, because it’s fueling more consolidation,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Digesters “don’t deal with the water pollution issues,” he added. While researchers say the modern consolidation of the dairy industry can be traced back to the dismantling of price supports that made milk profitable, thus encouraging an economy of scale, there’s serious concern among advocates that support for industrial waste management will further this consolidation. 

Industrialized dairying began in California in the 1990s, and now the so-called solution to the waste that results from raising so many cows on such limited land is also being exported from the West Coast across the country. States such as Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have or will soon consider incentive structures similar to the LCFS. Until states’ decisions are in place, participating farms outside of California can benefit from the LCFS. 

Christine Ball-Blakely, a senior staff attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, told Prism that North Carolina’s concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) are cashing in on California’s methane crediting policy. “Until recently, we had not seen any of those [CAFOs] participating in the Low Carbon Fuel Standard program and getting these credits,” Ball-Blakely said. Duplin and Samson counties, where industrial hog operations disproportionately affect Black residents, are “ground zero for the environmental injustice that this industry has brought [to] North Carolina,” said the attorney. 

As the birthplace of the modern environmental justice movement, Eastern North Carolina is no stranger to struggle. But what makes the fight against the LCFS program different is how farm-generated methane is marketed as environmentally friendly. 

Conventional sources of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, have been in decline for decades. Methane gas is referred to as a fossil fuel when it results from a process known as hydraulic fracturing; it’s considered a “renewable fuel source” when the methane comes from industrial factory farms. But the methane burns the same once it’s released into the atmosphere. In the 2010s, the “shale revolution” dramatically increased the availability of fracked methane gas, which was marketed by industry as a “bridge fuel” from dirty oil to clean sources of energy. 

But that transition away from fossil fuels toward less polluting sources appears to be in a state of suspended disbelief, where methane is still erroneously ruled as less polluting than carbon dioxide, and its end-use impacts are deemed more important than those faced by communities immediately surrounding extractive operations. 

Some assert that digesters aren’t all bad and that the technology should be used as a source of on-farm energy generation. Joe Rudek, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, told Prism that using digester-generated methane as a consumer fuel source isn’t “the best way to use it.” 

Rudek adds that the “carrying capacity” of the communities where digesters are sited needs to be taken into consideration.  If the “impact on local communities was taken into account, then you would have less of these issues,” Rudek said, referring to nitrate pollution from manure digestate—the solid waste that results from the process of creating gas—that is applied to the land after methane gas is created. 

Back in California, the state’s water board currently runs a number of programs aimed at reducing nitrate pollution in groundwater and sources of drinking water, said Kjia Rivers, a senior policy advocate with the Community Water Center. “A lot of sources of nitrate contamination in the Central Valley [and] Central Coast [are] irrigated agriculture and dairies,” Rivers said. 

Nitrate pollution is especially threatening to pregnant people, infants, and children because of its impact on the endocrine system. Nitrate pollution doesn’t have a taste or smell, and you can’t see it with the naked eye. 

“You only [detect] through well testing,” Rivers told Prism. 

But the problem is that residents such as those in Pixley and Planada, California, farming communities, who rely on domestic wells rather than municipal water systems, are responsible for their own testing. Rivers said that currently, there are no regulations for how often testing is performed, and operators of private domestic wells are not required to report testing results to the state. 

Well testing for what Rivers calls an “invisible pollutant” is merely a “band-aid solution.” Rather than repeat “band-aid” cycles of testing and encouraging residents to purchase bottled water, Rivers proposes managing nitrate at the source because “once nitrate contamination happens, it takes decades for it to resolve.” In practice, this could mean regulating the application of manure, a source of nitrate pollution, or preventing growers from overusing pesticides and other chemicals. 

But thus far, state agencies appear hesitant to directly regulate the dairy industry. Resident-activists say this is a central problem with the way the LCFS is designed: It incentivizes operators to create pollution rather than mitigate it. 

“It was a political solution, where policymakers did not want to challenge the industry directly by regulating their emissions,” Lilliston told Prism. 

“They need to be able to account for their water pollution,” he continued. “They need to be able to account for their air pollution.” 

Applying regulations to factory farms may even result in leveling out the playing field between industrial operations and small or midsize farms, he said. In Wisconsin, for example, digesters pair well with industrial facilities, with 70% of the large farms using the liquid manure management systems that are the base component of digester technology. Eighty percent of small farms process manure in its dry form—without the requisite lagoon where biogas microbes grow. 

California supports small farmers as it relates to manure methane—just not at the scale or with the prioritization that digesters receive. Dubbed the Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP), the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture provided more than $113 million since 2017 to small and midsize farm operators to manage methane pollution through methods usually associated with dairy farming, such as composting. 

However, the funding for AMMP pales in comparison to that of methane digesters. Residents affected by digester pollution want long-term solutions, not quick fixes that come at their expense. They’re not against the dairy industry, they say, but they want to know who will address their concerns, especially as it relates to the use of water. Dairies seem to have access to an unending supply, but if residents want to wash their cars or water their lawns, they’re ticketed, they say. 

Against the background of ongoing drought, residents also fear the day when water simply runs out. You can’t live without water, said Lenard Moreno, a lifelong resident of Planada, a small farming town fighting pollution from a nearby dairy operation. 

He wants to know: “Why isn’t anyone accountable?” 

Editorial Team:

Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor

Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor

Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor