"A new report tracks grants from the agency and finds that the largest contracts are going to big California dairies."
"The Department of Agriculture gives tens of millions of dollars every year to farmers and ranchers to support conservation efforts on their farms, but much of the funding ends up at big, industrial-scale operations that critics say worsen agricultural pollution and emit climate-warming greenhouse gases, a new report has found.
The report, released last week by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, concluded that one of the agency’s biggest and most popular conservation programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), gave out its costliest grants in 2022 to seven large dairy farms in California, the country’s biggest dairy-producing state.
These grants, nearly $300,000 each, were for construction of anaerobic digesters, which capture methane gas from lagoons where manure is collected. The methane is then converted into “biogas” that gets routed into pipelines to heat homes and buildings."
Georgina Gustin reports for Inside Climate News June 9, 2023.
Advertisement 
