A Virginia dairy takes 105,000 tons of discarded food and drink each year instead of sending it to waste; it becomes renewable gas

A dairy farm in Amelia Court House, Virginia, is running a large-scale anaerobic digester that converts food and beverage waste, along with dairy manure, into pipeline-quality renewable natural gas (RNG). This is happening about 40 minutes outside Richmond. Food waste makes up about 24 percent of the material in U.S. landfills, but according to an EPA analysis, it's responsible for an estimated 58 percent of the fugitive methane released from municipal solid waste landfills, because it decomposes faster than most other landfilled material, generating methane before gas-collection systems are in place. Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps significantly more heat than CO2 in the short term. This isn't simply a feel-good farm story because it is preventing food waste from rotting in a landfill. It's a very practical climate intervention in the disguise of a backyard project.

The dairy farm doing double duty

The project itself is a joint venture between the French energy company TotalEnergies and the renewable company Vanguard Renewables, an infrastructure investment firm of BlackRock. It is called the Oakmulgee Dairy Farm in Amelia Court House, Virginia. Vanguard Renewables broke ground on the project in October 2024; once operational, the anaerobic digester is projected to divert more than 105,000 tons of food and beverage waste a year that would otherwise go to landfill or incineration.

Rather, that waste is combined with dairy manure within an anaerobic digester, which is a large, oxygen-free vat that contains microbes to decompose all of the waste and “burst” out biogas. That gas is cleaned up into renewable natural gas (RNG), which generates over 259,000 million British thermal units annually. The RNG is then fed into AstraZeneca's biopharma plants in Maryland, which is a pretty ingenious supply chain.

An interesting concept, but with a catch

One farm diverting 105,000 tons of waste is a drop in the bucket when compared to the estimated 60 million tons of food that is wasted in the U.S. every year. Projects like this are also expensive to build, and pencil out largely because of tipping fees and federal tax credits, not because the underlying economics are obviously favorable on their own; a Cornell University case study on similar ventures found they depend heavily on incentives introduced through the Inflation Reduction Act.

In other words, without policy support, many farmers would be unlikely to build one on their own. It is also important to consider a fairness issue. As the production of renewable natural gas requires financial incentives and long-term agreements with multinational energy companies, it becomes out of reach for the smaller farms which constitute the majority of American agriculture.

The bigger picture

The EPA’s own tracking of digesters on livestock operations finds that the number of operational plants increased from around 270 in 2020 to 400 by mid-2024, and more are still being constructed, with the majority specifically for producing pipeline-quality renewable natural gas rather than simply generating electricity. That's growth, despite coming from a very low baseline. Projects such as Oakmulgee are not a complete solution to the food-waste problem or climate change. They show that ordinary infrastructure can play a climate role without a high-profile corporate campaign.