A commercial hog farm near Miguel Allemán that is earning an income from incinerating methane from its pig manure. The black rubber cap captures methane from a manure storage pond and allows it to be piped to the incinerator. Methane is a powerful cause of greenhouse warming of the global climate. Certified emission reductions of methane are purchased by companies in countries that have agreed to curb greenhouse gases as signatories of the Kyoto treaty.

By Rob Taylor, Director, Science and Environment Programs

Miguel Allemán, Mexico

The Alexandria farm is turning hog feces into money.

That was the conclusion of a group of Mexican reporters who visited the farm here in early March on a program run by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).

Here, managers transfer hog wastes into a large storage pond covered by a black rubber cap. As the wastes decay under the hot sun, they emit methane gas, a powerful cause of global warming. But instead of rising into the atmosphere to generate more warming, this so-called “greenhouse” gas is piped to an incinerator, which burns the methane, eliminating its capacity for warming. Methane gas destruction is financed by companies in countries covered by the Kyoto Treaty, an agreement to reduce greenhouse gases that has been signed by at least 169 countries and other governmental entities. This farm alone collects more than $2,700 per day from capturing and destroying methane, according to Aarón Martínez of AgCert, an international leader in the production and sale of greenhouse gas emission-reductions from agriculture, which certifies gas reductions here.

The farm tour was part of a three-day, ICFJ workshop on sustainable development in the state of Sonora on the fringe of the Gulf of California. In the project, 20 journalists met experts, researched issues, practiced story development and visited tourism and agricultural developments.

Mexican journalists getting a briefing on tourist development in the Gulf of California near San Carlos Bay at Guaymas, (State of Sonora).

The Gulf of California region’s farms and tourism facilities are booming. In the workshop, journalists heard of the benefits in jobs and incomes from industry promoters, including Epifanio Salido Pavlovich, coordinator of the Commission to Promote Tourism in the Mexican state of Sonora. They also heard environmental groups worry that rapidly expanding hotels, vacation homes and farms are polluting and damaging fragile desert habitat, overtaxing fresh water supplies and blighting pristine landscapes on the picturesque fringes of the Gulf.

Among those speaking to the group on conservation issues were Dr. Joaquin Murrieta Saldivar, conservation director of the Sonoran Institute; Jim Detjen, director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University; Alejandro Castillo, coastal conservation director for the Centro Intercultural de Estudios de Desiertos y Océanos (CEDO); and environmental scientists at Prescott College’s field station in Bahia Kino.

The workshop was the second in two years in the Gulf of California region that ICFJ has carried out for Mexican reporters and editors. The program also includes contests and fellowships for reporting on sustainable development in the region. It is sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation with help from the International Community Foundation, Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, Periodismo para Elevar la Conciencia Ecológica, and the Centro de Periodismo y Etica Pública.