Скачать или смотреть Why Missouri manure is being shipped to California

Seven years ago, California embarked on an aggressive plan to reduce methane emissions from in-state dairy farms by bolstering a system of carbon credits. The credits encouraged the state’s dairy farmers to capture methane, a greenhouse gas that is produced by animal waste, and inject it into pipelines for use as an alternative fuel.

But the state’s effort to combat global warming has morphed into something bigger: a sprawling program that financially benefits factory farms far beyond its own borders.

Small farmers, environmental advocates and scholars in Missouri and elsewhere say California’s system is helping perpetuate noxious, environmentally hazardous and agriculturally unsound practices in other states, where the credits are boosting companies that raise tens of thousands of hogs in a handful of barns and pump the poop into waste ponds.

“This should be embarrassing for the state of California,” said Scott Dye, a sustainable agriculture advocate whose family’s century-old farm sits near hog barns in Missouri operated by Smithfield Foods, the Chinese-controlled company that is the nation’s largest pork producer. “It is rewarding companies that have a decades-long record of creating havoc on the environment here.”

Caption from article by Evan Halper and Samuel Oakford.