Animal Protection New Mexico knows the fight against climate change, and the need to adapt and respond to its effects, is critical to sustaining the planet and all of its inhabitants, including animals.
To that end, we have been monitoring the New Mexico Environment Department’s development of rules to implement the new Clean Transportation Fuels Program. This is a new regulatory program that aims to reduce air pollution by creating a market system where corporations can sell or buy credits for low-carbon and high-carbon fuels, and the intent is to foster the use of cleaner, low-emission fuels.
But here’s the problem: The program benefits and incentivizes the growth of factory farms—like industrial mega-dairies— where thousands of cows are tightly confined for their entire lives. Their manure accumulates under their feet and is moved into giant manure lagoons, largely untreated, where it festers and produces large amounts of methane gas. Under the Clean Transportation Fuels Program, the mega-dairies can then capture that methane and sell it as low-carbon fuel credits.
That means the program’s proposed rules actually encourage, with financial rewards, mega-dairies to balloon in size and multiply, with as many cows as possible, to create as much manure and methane as possible—so that the dairy industry can make as much money as possible.
New Mexico already has the largest average dairy cow herd size in the country, and according to the latest data we’ve seen, our mega-dairies generate 11.5 billion pounds of manure each year—four times more than New Mexico’s human population generates. The resulting manure and urine are notorious for polluting groundwater and drinking water. Mega-dairies also subject their surroundings to dangerous public health threats and nuisances, with the stink, flies, and pollution disproportionately impacting low-income communities and rural communities of color.
Not only are mega-dairies water-intensive, water-polluting, and noxious to neighbors, but they are also the site of some of the worst large-scale animal cruelty found in the state. Most recently, earlier this year, the New Mexico Livestock Board undertook a felony animal cruelty investigation of a mega-dairy in Roswell with approximately 6,000 dairy cows and calves, after footage showed cows being brutally beaten and pregnant cows having calves prematurely and violently extracted, resulting in injury and death.
The last thing New Mexico can afford to do is adopt a policy that gives mega-dairies a green light to get bigger and create even bigger problems than they already do.
That’s why, on October 2, APNM attended the Environment Department rule hearing on this program and provided public comments urging the Department to close the “factory farm loophole” in the Clean Transportation Fuels Program. Any true environmental solution should not pay mega-dairies to create more pollution (and perpetuate animal cruelty at the same time). We will continue to watch this closely, as the rule-making hearing resumes in November.
This work comes in the wake of APNM’s newly released report: Dairy’s Not Fair: Why New Mexico’s Children Deserve Plant-Based Milk Options in Schools. Please take the time to read and share it with any impacted families as well as any educators, school administrators, and policymakers you know.
