This story was originally published by KUNM it’s republished here with permission.

Over the past 20 years, New Mexico has lost half of its family-scale dairy farms to big factory farms. That’s according to Food & Water Watch, an advocacy group that argues this increasing reliance on these big farms is harmful to air, land, and water quality. The organization is seeking a moratorium on these operations.

Factory farms are also known as concentrated animal feeding operations with over 500 head of cattle. Manure and wastewater from these animal feeding facilities can create hazardous outdoor air pollution, according to the National Cancer Institute.

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Food & Water Watch says New Mexico mega dairies produce enough manure to overflow nine Olympic swimming pools each day. That’s 11 times as much sewage produced by the Albuquerque metropolitan area.

The group says frontline communities, who are often low-income or people of color, face the greatest impacts.

Emily Tucker, New Mexico organizer for Food & Water Watch, recalled a time when she and a colleague did a flyover at a factory farm and the smell was intense.

“We could smell them from 6,500 feet in the air,” she said. “And that was just really, really eye opening to just how intense the odor around these facilities is.”

The industry has touted digesters at these facilities that extract methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they say could be used as a fuel source. But a number of environmental groups have argued this is not a workable climate solution.

Food & Water Watch also wants to change New Mexico’s Clean Transportation Fuel Standard, which passed in the last legislative session and created a statewide “carbon intensity” rating for transportation fuels.

Tucker said that Democrats in the last session championed this bill as a solution to getting clean energy in New Mexico, but it’s not practical.

“We really do oppose programs like these,” she said. “They are an industry carbon trading scheme that allows polluters to continue to pollute, and doesn’t do a whole lot to really hold them accountable.”

The group will push a new bill in the upcoming session that would amend the standard.

Support from the coverage comes from the Thornburg Foundation.

Source New Mexico is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com.