Wearing a saccharine grin, Ray Brewer swished fat fingers through a bucket of fertilizer pellets and rattled out the mating call of a con man—the sweet sound of money. In droves, the faithful dumped $8.75 million into his agricultural skin game.
Nestled in a basement chop shop beneath the glamor of an infinity pool and a house in the hills, Brewer bilked investors and farmers from 2014-2019, based entirely on cow manure and the lure of biogas, renewable energy, and tax incentives.
Most agriculture crimes are coated in a veneer of reality—enough truth to hide the rot. Not so with silver-tongued Brewer. His scam was a total lie.
He understood the rules of a modern ag heist: Nothing so green as a green energy con.
The Man From Nowhere
In a single day, a dairy cow can expel close to 100-plus lb. of waste. The U.S. leader at roughly $9.7 billion in annual milk sales, California is home to the nation’s largest dairy herd: 1.7 million defecating milk cows.
In 2014, Ray Holcomb Brewer, 57, navigated California’s Central Valley agriculture as a commanding, highly intelligent, and persuasive predator. At 6’ and 300 lb., balding and silver-mustached, Brewer presented himself as an engineer with knowledge of each nut and bolt, along with every profitability angle, of anaerobic digesters—alchemy machines that churn turds into money.
He made the rounds of dairy industry events, conferences, and equipment tradeshows, showing leg to potential investors via construction or operation of a whopping 12 anaerobic digesters (129 digesters are currently functioning statewide) in Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare counties, and a lone digester in Idaho. As the CEO of CH4 Power, headquartered in Tulare, Brewer promised investors returns in less than two years, generated from 66% of methane gas sales, carbon offsets, fertilizer, and tax breaks—all derived from his dairy digesters.
In truth, despite Brewer’s peacocking, he had no digesters under construction; no functioning digesters cooking manure; no byproducts; and no farmland. Nuffin.
Brewer’s track record was blank, says Henry Carbajal, assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California and Unit Chief for White-Collar Crime. “It was almost like he popped out of the blue. Prior to the early 2000s, we still don’t know where he came from. We believe he had a background in the agriculture industry, but it was very difficult to find records beforehand.”
“The evidence we uncovered shows he worked as a consultant or had a digester-related role, but we don’t know where,” Carbajal says. “That was in the early 2000s, but again, before that he is somewhat of an unknown.”
Joseph Barton, assistant U.S. attorney under Carbajal, says Brewer mastered the lexicon of the agriculture industry. “He created entirely fake power generation reports which were extremely complicated and detailed. He’d send the reports to investors and say, ‘Look how much power my digesters are generating.’ Where did he learn to prepare those? We don’t know.”
“This was not someone who decided overnight to execute a fraud,” Barton adds. “Brewer was a guy with a past in something agriculture related.”
Indeed. The man from nowhere knew precisely how to build a Ponzi on farmland.
Ray’s Magical Beans
Brewer hung a shingle in Tulare. His company, CH4 Power, occupied an executive suite in an office park, manned by less than 10 employees. Purposely, Brewer hired agriculture newbies unfamiliar with livestock or farms. “We don’t believe any of them knew what was going on,” Barton explains. “The people working for him thought he was running a legitimate business.”
And business, Brewer asserted, was building a better mousetrap. He didn’t claim to invent breakthrough digester technology. Rather, he insisted, his innovation was streamlining the overall digester process with superior knowledge in mechanics, land approval, environmental regs, code compliance, timeline, local authorities, farmer connections, and permitting process: I am the engineer and I know.
As described in a federal 2019 indictment: “Defendant Brewer purported to have developed an anaerobic digester that would help dairies meet or exceed greenhouse gas emission standards and generate up to ten times the amount of energy that the dairies used, which would create reliable revenue streams for years to come.”
He sought big-city investors (domestic and foreign) eager to catch the carbon wave, but ignorant about agriculture, and wooed them via marketing materials, power generation reports, digester photos, and signed buyer contracts. As a cherry on top, Brewer promised a green energy tax incentive if payment was made before the calendar year ended. The investors, on Brewer’s word, anticipated the immediate tax money bump, followed by booming returns upon digester completion the following year.
To build his bonafides, Brewer signed several lease agreements with Central Valley dairies, falsely promising to build digesters. Simultaneously, he forged lease agreements with other dairies, backed by fake farmer signatures. Brewer then used the growing pile of counterfeit documents to deceive investors. All the while, he never began construction on a single digester.
Whenever investors visited on-site in Tulare to eyeball completed digesters or units under construction, Brewer took them to a genuine, functioning digester and feigned ownership, or carried clients to a farm (that he didn’t own) and claimed that digester construction was imminent.
“With the ties he had in the agriculture industry, he got access to a real digester,” Barton says. “It wasn’t his, but he passed it off as his. These were machines that had to be managed, but ran by themselves for extended periods of time, so Brewer would take his tours there at the right time and there wouldn’t be hardly anyone around.”
Adding layers to the cake, Brewer kept buckets of digester-produced, no-scent fertilizer pellets in his Tulare office, gleefully showing the contents to curious investors as tangible proof of amazing returns, i.e., Ray and his magical farm beans.
“It was such a compelling prop,” Barton notes. “He had pails of pellets to give to investors. He’d say, ‘We’re so successful that even our byproducts are selling and I’ve got contracts I can show you right here. A win-win.’”
Capping off the tours, Brewer wined and dined visitors roughly 120 miles north of Los Angeles at his fine residence in the hills, a 3,700 sq ft home on 10 acres purchased with seed money from his initial investors, complete with infinity pool and the new shine of several Dodge Ram trucks parked in the driveway, along with ATVs aplenty.
Money, honey. The manure Ponzi climbed higher and higher. If, and when, the base began creaking, Brewer would take his millions and run.
$100 Million Flex
The levers of fraud were pulled in an office basement at Brewer’s home—a chop shop.
Hunched over a desk, Brewer forged financial records, power generation reports, invoices, REC certificates, construction schedules, and permitting documents, keeping unsigned templates at the ready for repeated use. He also manipulated photographs, according to the subsequent federal indictment: Defendant Brewer obtained stock photographs of anaerobic digesters that were under construction that he did not own or control and had no involvement in building. Defendant Brewer then sent the photographs, sometimes after causing alterations to be made to the photographs, to different investors at various times to show them progress on different purported digesters when there had not been any construction.
Each time Brewer received new investor money, he opened a corresponding bank account, and then slid the money into sub-accounts with deceptive titles (Interconnection Engineering; Interconnection Permit; Water Board Fees) seemingly related to digester construction. He then blew the funds on personal items, while maintaining forged invoices as proof the money was spent on digester materials.
As dollars poured in, Brewer partied.
According to investigators, every penny of the Ponzi traced to personal expenditure: RVs, trucks, Harley-Davidsons, scores of guns, property, and more personal assets. He spent zero on construction material.
“The dedication and detail to money laundering is almost unique to Brewer,” Carbajal says. “You just don’t see it often in these cases because it takes heavy forethought and planning.”
Brewer’s wire transfers composed a steady chain of theft across 2016-2018, ranging from $14,900 to $5,000,000. As the money flowed, Brewer made a $100-million flex: He faked a letter from Rabobank backing a $100-million loan to build anaerobic digesters.
“I think he was having a good time,” Barton says. “It was as if he’d gotten his Series A startup going with several million dollars, and now it was time for Series B. The fake $100 million letter was a broadcast to investors that a real financial institution was backing it all up. With a number so big, investors assumed everything must have been vetted. Therefore, this had to be the real McCoy.”
“But it was a lie; the letter was altered by Brewer,” Barton continues. “In the genuine letter, the bank stated it was not committed to lending money until due diligence was performed. Investors never saw the genuine letter.”
In classic Ponzi mathematics, Brewer kept his early CH4 Power investors smiling by providing them with small payments gleaned from subsequent investors.
However, as the months rolled by, he ran short of Peters to pay Pauls. Irate investors, sick of Brewer’s promises, began filing lawsuits.
One step ahead of tar and feathers, it was time for Brewer to bounce. The natives were restless.
Grifters Gonna Grift
Arkansas and Nevada were Brewer’s ticket out of California. With a stolen Social Security number plucked from a dead man in Arkansas (first used by Brewer at least as far back as 2003), and a bogus “Ray Lenair Brewer” Nevada driver’s license, he moved 1,100 miles northeast to Sheridan, Montana, and switched his remaining assets to his wife’s name.
Brewer may have separated his scams from pillow talk. “He was married, but his wife later claimed she never knew he was doing anything illegal—and based on the evidence, we believed her,” Barton says. “When we talked to victims, they had met his wife, but they said that during business talks, she wasn’t around or referenced.”
In southwest Montana, Brewer hit the ground running in a blur of skullduggery: He bought a 12-acre property in Madison County, obtained a $118,000 COVID Paycheck Protection Program in the name of defunct CH4 Power, started another digester company—Mesa Renewable Energy, and quickly scalped his first victim of $90,000 by masquerading as a custom storage shed builder.
Grifters gonna grift.
However, Brewer finally reaped the whirlwind of his prior scheme. His power generation reports from the ghost digester in Idaho, sent to a nonprofit for certification of carbon offset credits, had generated an audit. The result? A blank, i.e., the Idaho digester didn’t exist. A federal investigation opened as the dominoes fell, and Brewer popped into the crosshairs of two bulldog U.S. attorneys—Carbajal and Barton.
Arrested by Madison County sheriff’s deputies in November 2020, Brewer maintained flimflam form in custody, insisting his identity was “Ray Lenair Brewer,” and not “Ray Holcomb Brewer.”
When the ID switcheroo failed to gain traction, Brewer spat out stolen valor.
Hoping to gain sympathy, he told deputies he was a Navy veteran who had once saved several members of a flight crew on the deck of an aircraft carrier. After an incoming jet caught fire during a rough landing, Brewer suffered burns while shielding the crew from flames, according to his fabrication. (Significantly, Brewer floated the identical war story to several digester investors.)
“Not true,” Barton says. “Complete lie. It wasn’t true for any of his identities. He never served in the Navy or any other branch of the military.”
“In our experience, most Ponzi schemers finally give it up when they’re caught solid,” Carbajal adds. “Not Brewer. It was doubling and tripling down. He tried to get out of anything and everything to the end.”
Sent back to California for trial, Brewer was nailed to the wall when Carbajal and Barton exposed the paper trail. Brewer, 66, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft charges—yet lied to the end.
At sentencing in June 2023, he arrived in a wheelchair with a final tale to spin. During his detention at Fresno County Jail, a nurse had been attacked by inmates. Brewer played on the incident in open court by telling the judge he had jumped into the assault and saved the nurse from further injury, resulting in knee damage to himself and the necessity of a wheelchair.
Barton sets the record straight: “He lied—again. Brewer had hurt his knee previously in a motorcycle accident on one of the Harley-Davidson motorcycles he bought with stolen investor money.”
Brewer, federal inmate #14502-097, received six years and nine months in prison and was ordered to pay $8.75 million in restitution.
Green Web
At the peak of his Ponzi power in December 2016, while raking in millions, Brewer spoke to the Visalia Times-Delta about the failure of past digester models, and told a telltale lie: “In our world, we’re the guys that come in with the fund. All the dairymen have to do is collect the money.”
It was one more gross falsehood in a green web of fiction: “It was all fake,” Barton says. “There were no contracts, no digesters, no end customers, and no farmland. There was nothing but the investors.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History
