In 2025, the American Biogas Council (ABC), the country’s main lobby for manure factory farm gas (also known as biogas), estimated that there could be FFG operations installed at over 11,000 animal farms in the United States. That is around half of the confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that operate in the United States, according to the EPA.
Those 11,000 farms are not small-scale, pasture-based operations merely trying to offset some energy costs. They are, almost exclusively, industrial farms where animal waste lingers in massive cesspools.
And this is by design: FFG production requires such polluting cesspools, and therefore mass-confinement operations, because those are the sort of animal factories that produce the most manure. In some cases, these farms are farming manure almost as much as they are farming animals.
Much has been written challenging this technology and the associated deluge of federal and state deregulation and financing efforts, including by Farm Forward. The consensus among critics is that factory farm gas functions to entrench (and even expand) some of the most polluting farms in the country—all while not delivering on dubious claims of climate benefit.
What’s more is the perverse incentive it creates: policies that prop up FFG lead to a reality where producing more methane from animal waste is one of the most profitable endeavors a dairy or pig operation could engage in.
Now, as we reveal in a new issue brief, there is much to be said about the fragility of these operations. They are financially unstable and go bankrupt at high rates. Local communities don’t want them near their homes and rightfully fight to stop new proposed operations and expanding CAFOs. They will likely require a slate of government incentive programs forever in order to remain viable. And they aren’t even that effective at reducing methane emissions relative to alternatives. It’s not the case that they are destined to work.
However, we ought to consider: if they did succeed, what would that mean for animals? What would that mean for food systems reform?
Returning to the 11,000 number, if we take it at face value, and we consider that, conservatively, the average digester is connected to a population of around 4,000 animals, that would mean over 40 million animals could be functionally locked into the factory farming system. And that number could be low. Currently, most FFG operations are located at dairy farms, which tend to have fewer animals than some pig farms and all chicken farms. If the chicken industry more broadly adopted FFG technology, the numbers of animals housed on farms with digesters could be an order of magnitude or more larger.
As an example, we generated an approximate analysis based on FFG projections for Iowa, a state with about 25 million pigs producing more than 100 billion pounds of manure per year, more than 25 times greater than all of the waste produced by all of the human residents of Iowa. Based on our analysis, we estimate that over 11 million pigs in Iowa could be connected to FFG operations in the coming decades, all depending on where the industry goes.
And remember: these operations aren’t your grandpa’s farm with a few pigs; they are high-confinement ones where animals suffer brutal, painful, and short lives.
Further, if these projections are correct, it could have meaningful implications for the broader project of food systems reform. How much harder would it be to transition to a more humane and sustainable food system when a nexus of powerful industries is doubling down on the factory farm model? In particular, some of the most promising paths forward for the food system—farmer transition, higher-welfare farming, regenerative models, plant-based and cultivated alternatives—all could be challenged by entangling factory farms with energy production.
And when there are so many better ways forward, committing ourselves to a fragile, inefficient technology that exacerbates some of the worst of the food system is no way forward at all.