Manure-Powered Generators On The Rise 444
Sunkist writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a report on Marin County rancher Albert Straus that, after 25 years of work, began using a generator powered by manure. While this type of 'power' has been in use for a while, recent legislation has made it more widespread. From the article, 'The Straus Farms' covered-lagoon methane generator, powered by methane billowing off a covered pool of decomposing bovine waste, is expected to save the operation between $5,000 and $6,000 per month in energy costs.' Let's hear it for poop!"
So cows ARE worth a shitload! (Score:3, Interesting)
Holy cow! (Score:5, Interesting)
Low tech version (Score:1, Interesting)
Liquid Manure (Score:5, Interesting)
Eventually my Uncle's family farm went under and was auctioned off. I wonder if this kind of thing would have been enough to keep him in business? He now works for a big giant 'corporate' farm. Truth be told- from a purely economic perspective he is better off. He gets regular vacation (never had that with his own farm) and makes o.k. money.
What would get me excited is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The inherited problem is still (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of poop = lots of electricity (Score:5, Interesting)
On the panel, an electricity meter began running backward, indicating that power originating from a nearby poop-filled lagoon near the town of Marshall was feeding into PG&E's electric power grid.
A well-fed dairy cow produces 120 pounds of manure every day, or 40,000 pounds per year per animal.
These cows are pooping money!
Happy Trails!
Erick
My grandfather used a form of this in farming.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Arizona Landfills Use a Similar Process (Score:5, Interesting)
Doubtful (Score:5, Interesting)
I see this as more of a way of recycling. Crap is a by-product of an animal using energy. The actual energy needed to produce that crap is immense. Think of the grass that has to grow and the nutrients placed into the soil, then what your body can't use is the crap. When it gets down to it... we would probably save money, and resources just growing tress on that land and burning those(skip the cow). The benefit to the current setup is that we can raise the cow, eat em, and then recycle the by-products.
Old news! (Score:2, Interesting)
World wide there are literally hundreds of thousands of them (methane digesters using arobic digestion), most of them being single family sized units where the collected gas is burned in small cookers and for lighting.
I built a digester in the mid 70's, was EXTEREMELY easy to make. I worked on a large dairy then, despite running the digester for all summer and collecting gas, just a small display size prootype unit, I could NOT get the farmer to drive over one mile to my cabin to look at it. His stock question was "why aren't THEY doing it if it is so good?" The gas collected was great, basically burned like propane. I tried other farmers over the years,I have yet to get one to take the plunge and actually do anything different, alwatys the same, it ain't in their propaganda magazines for their particular niche for farming. You can NOT get those guys to do anything practical until they get "permission" from the agribiz cartels, and right now, the agribiz cartels want the farmers to buy expensive petroleum and chemical products from them or their country club buddies. and the farmers WONDER why they keep going broke....and they TEACH going broke in the ag colleges, which is AMAZING to me they can suck young guys into doing that.
At least this one dairy farmer in the article gets it, it's probably only one in a thousand or less that can actually think for themselves. Work hard, 7 days a week, YEP! They do, been there done that meself. think outside the box? Hardly ever happens, so petrified of their buddies at the co-op and the feed store thinking they are "enviros" or something near as I can tell.
Flash forward almost 30 years now, I get the same thing today, I work part time on a large poultry farm, besides methane digestion I have also asked why they don't use sprouted grains instead of the dismal dried up crap they call "feed" that barely keeps the cluckers clucking. SAME ANSWER, because "they" don't do it, this "they" guy who tells them what to do, it's not in the trade mags so "it doesn't work, it's hippie pie in the sky stuff enviro whackos".
I LAUGH every time I hear of a farmer going broke, because if they only thought just a smidgen outside the box and stepped back from being brainwashed by archerdanielsdowmonsantoexxon, they could make money, and easily. But no, they'll defend practices that they follow that produce for them a lower profit return than their grand daddys got in world war two. Sure, they can grow huger volumes of much crappier food off an acre, deal is, it IS crappier food and they hand over their cash to the big companies, then the bank takes their property eventually. Lead around by the nose don't even begin to describe it.
And I get the same thing from urban internet engineering "experts" who have constantly told me over the years my solar panels don't work, they "aren't practical". Funny, my electric bill is PAID OFF, I don't get a "monthly" bill with no idea what it will be if there's any political or middleman trading shenanigans. but, "solar isn't practical".
Right.
The 21st century will belong to those who can think out of the box and stop making money for THE MAN, who work FOR THEMSELVES, and stop supporting those brane dead politicians and political parties who are in THE MAN's pockets.
Re:Tina Turner (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fuel consumed in Feed Lots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doubtful (Score:2, Interesting)
How about pig lagoons? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The inherited problem is still (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you kidding?
Have you ever heard the old adage that a squirrel could walk from Maine to Florida without touching the ground? The reason for this adage is that the entire eastern seaboard of the US used to be a SUPER-dense old-growth forest. That forest has since been nearly obliterated, and very little of the original growth actually remains.
That's the greatest example of deforestation in the US, but there are plenty of others that are worthy of note. Then you can look at other countries (Ireland, UK) that used to be almost entirely covered and have less than 1% of their original forests remaining.
-rt
depends (Score:5, Interesting)
Second,to get back to some farm savings, although the nitrogen level % remains the same in the manure and water slurry after digestion, it is in a more available form to plants than normal aerobic digestion or composting (farmers just shoot this stuff back on the fields now, with conveyor spreaders or flail spreaders). I have read it is as high as 600% better with anerobic digestion, so you get significant savings on fertilizer (which is a HUGE cost now and going up because artificial fertiliser is made from natural gas), which is what's done with the slurry after it has exhausted methane production potential. And last, it is "relatively" cheap to build these things,and they are incredibly scalable, there's a size and technique to fit any size operation, from joe water buffalo rice farmer on up. There are hundreds of thousands of them around the planet now,of various sizes,just not much in the US, so here it's stayed mostly "experimental",and they have to "study it", etc, that's all, any place else it's just normal, and sunlight is an excellent conversion tool for getting solar energy into various useful products. It's very productive sunlight is,a great energy conversion tool, especially with living plants, and it's the only practical fusion generator we have, and it's "free and open source", the government or industry can't charge you for it directly. They will play act at supporting it, that's about it, it doesn't lend itself to monopoly control, so they spread a lot of economic FUD around it.
Remember, farming has always been profitable and useful,well, from obvious reasons, food is kinda nice, even before modern techniques were invented, so it's quite do-able. Look at giant forests, grow all on their own, no high tech anything needed for them to grow, just water, dirt, sunlight, air, done. They are just huge biological manufacturing plants, quite sophisticated really, and that's all any farm is, a biological factory, and there's various ways to cut costs and remain profitable, ONCE you as joe big farmer STOP being brainwashed by monsanto and the energy companies and the equipment companies and the banks. You have to break that mindset of "dependence" first before you can wrap your brane around "how to do it" better. That first step is just too much for most people to get over. It's not really their fault, it's how they were taught, and what the "approved" techniques are as taught at ag colleges and in industry orgs. There are VERY few independent farmers around, the vast majority are really just coporate sub contractors and have to follow these corporation rules. The guy I work for owns three large farms, he is controlled by his suppliers and marketing org down to an obscene picky little level like you wouldn't believe on how to run his farm, or he can't market, and that's the biggest problems farmers have now, and they get trapped into it, go along, or go broke. Once in and in debt, they are trapped, it's almost like a form of serfdom on a large scale. It's a hard
Re:The inherited problem is still (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course there is still a problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another interesting bit is that at least in the USA many agricultural soils are quite rich in nutrients, such as phosphorus. in places like the midwest were dairy and pig farms are common manure is often liquefied and spread on fields. this is good fertilizer but in the case of pig manure it actually leads to phosphorus overload of the soils. so in Essence we don't need to do this but farmers need to get rid of the manure. this has lead to increased P contamination of water ways as well. id expect that their deodorized doncomposer sludge and water will be no different.
these facts have been know for quite some time. already there is allot of legislation on the books or in the works against liquid manure holding ponds. The elimination of fertilizer runoff into the surface and ground waters is also heavily regulated. i suppose that if done right this can work but it is not as easy or as low cost as it may seem. maybe a centralized facility can buy manure and process it in large scale for methane and be safe and then market the byproducts as assayed fertilizer. but allot of small unlined pond operations randomly spreading sludge and runoff can easily lead to trouble.
*something from "nothing" is great, except when "nothing" it is more than you can pay....
Re:depends (Score:4, Interesting)
Great info. The point of my post was precisely that big business has corralled the American farming industry into extremely consumptive and wasteful practices. As you mentioned, we are using fertilizers made from natural gas. The big feed lot business plan has farmers expending a great deal of energy to harvest and move materials to the feed lots. Bio mass plants on the tail end of this ineffiencient structure simply reduces the amount of energy lost through the process.
For biomass to become a net producer of energy, we need to first get around the energy wasting processes of the big business agriculture.
Farmers using biomass generators is a completely different situation.
I had to read this twice. This is not a failure of the free market...but a failure of big business and politics. An individual owning an asset that produces energy is the type of thing that exists in free markets. The blocks big oil and utilities put to small operations like this are anti-market forces.
On the up side, the natural food market is strong. Large sections of the farming market are becoming hippy. In some cases there is big money in natural produces...and more of the money in natural foods gets to the farmer. There is growing support for the use of renewable energy...so the mindset of the farming community is apt to change.
In part this is backward thinking caused by seeing biomass only from the position of a consumer. A farmer that produces energy from biomass could consume it...or they could sell it. For that matter, I think there is more future in developing a market for biomass energy than simply as a way to cut costs.
Re:Doubtful (Score:2, Interesting)
another "hippy" example catching on (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got a few PV panels and the rest of the rig for my solar installation(it's mounted on my RV now since we moved and got a small house), a small wind genny, and two fuel gennys,one a 120 VAC output and one just a 12 VDC. So even if the grid completely poofs I have *some* power available and it's *paid off*, I own it. And I'm at the bottom of the economic food chain in the US income-wise, so if I can do it, almost anyone can to some degree, we just need to get the interest up to a critical threshold, like what happened with computers. Look around now, 20 years ago hardly anyone owned a personal computer, now its ridiculous common. We CAN change if we can bypass big government and big energy FUD that we got to "study it" for another 50 years. We done did studied it since the 60's, time to build a lot of them, IMO. Let's get it on, time to act, not think about acting.
In california it's taking off,look at the example in the article, because they got burned, bad, relying on government and big business to be honest and fair and to watch out for the poor peepuls, phooie, they BURNED the folks out in cal, so you have more awareness there of the importance of backups, and diverse sources.
And de centralised power is better for national security! A few more million points of production spread out over the USA makes it much less likely that if any large plants go out from attack/damage/political & economic shenanigans that it will have as bad an effect. As to selling it, sure! If you have more than what you can use, you SHOULD be able to market it into the grid, or offer it in other ways. The exisitng energy industry has been fighting this for decades now, they do NOT want competition. They got mandated the lock-in generations ago,and they wanted to keep it. It's changing but they fought it constantly and still are whenever they can Now ME if I had a surplus of electricity or burnable gas, I'd use it for more projects/businesses, I wouldn't just sell it, that's just selling off raw materials in a sense, and it's usually a better deal to just keep converting until you have a better, more profitable pr
Re:Wait, no really... (Score:2, Interesting)
As for diluting the biomatter anything organic will work and you will get methane. Ask any environmental engineer and we can go on for hours on this wonderful subject.
This is nothing new, only on a smaller scale.
Re:Doubtful (Score:5, Interesting)
Forcing grazing animals like cows and chickens to be carnivors is now illegal after the big agribusiness companies were finally forced to acknowledge science and admit that such unnatural practices cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka "mad cow disease"), which is passed to people who consume the cows as vCJD, which is fatal. There is no cure, for cows or people. Of course, there is little enforcement and the laws are still widely ignored.
For about a decade, insulin has been almost exclusively provided by hard working recombinant DNA bacteria. This is actual human insulin, free of transgenic viruses and foreign proteins that trigger a human immune response.
Not even close. In the span of time appropriate for a reference to evolution, it's true to say we evolved with plants. Evidence indicates that humans evolved eating mostly plants, with a small amount of animal protein, much like the diets of chimps, lowland mountain gorillas and baboons. Proto-humans are believed to have supplemented their primarily plant based diet with almost as much insect protein as protein from mammals. It would be almost as correct to say "I've been using a computer my entire adult life, so humans evolved to use computers", or "I've been eating pizza since 1970, so humans evolved to eat pizza." The association with eating cows goes back a few more generations, but not nearly enough to justify a connection with evolution.
From a health perspective, people eat far too much meat and milk. There are much healthier plant sources of protein. PETA is probably exagerating the energy difference between raising plants for humans versus raising plants for cattle to feed humans, but it's still true that an acre of crops can feed more people than the same acre could feed if routed through a cow. Reasonable estimates I've seen indicate a 7:1 advantage.
glad you noticed (Score:2, Interesting)
On a dairy, it's better to have a larger herd, the equipment costs are (I am being quite broad now)almost the same for a 50 cow herd as a 500, so it just makes sense to try and max out there, even if the daily chores are more. It would also lead to schemes such as the methane plant being more cost effective to implement. With free range grass fed ranching, it isn't practical, your methane producing stock (heh) is not all easy to scoop up, it's all over yonder all over the pastures. On a dairy it is highly concentrated and you got to do something with it. Same with the poultry farmers now, MAN, they get a lot. usually now it'scomposted, then spread, it's held in very large barns for a year or so, various EPA regs and so on to control runoff. I think that's reasonable, although I'd like to see them use more methane production as well, and in fact, that's where a lot of the large methane plants are now.
heh, one of my jobs on a dairy once, head poop scooper in the free stall barn. man, that's a lotta stuff! I used a bobcat to scoop to an underground chain driven dealie that moved it outside and directly into a HUGE spreader wagon. That's exactly why I built that example small digester I was talking about in my post. Saw all that methane gas going to waste, thought it would save joe farmer some cash, maybe get me a raise...maybe.
Nope. too hippy of an idea....
Back to ranching, it's very close to being akin to desktop dominance with the big packers. In fact I'd say it's a worse monopoly than with MS. There are few alternatives, you go with the packers and sell your beef, or struggle spend half your time developing a market rather than ranching. the independnets hate it, but they are enscrewed in it. There's some effort going on now with the independents to get some sort of anti trust relief, but it's a struggle for them, as you can imagine.
And as to land valuation, etc, there's a vital interst there that goes beyond current day to day economics. Food isn't a luxury. To me, it is more important to have widely diverse and localized points of production in "food", same as I mentioned for energy. In a crisis, or say something happens, transportation gets borked, fuel costs skyrocket from some new war, etc(man, if that ain't happening now, sheesh), you are gonna want *real close by* food production. It'll come in handy. The average US grocery store has around 3 days food before they are tapped. In a crisis, you don't want to rely totally on stuff being able to get shipped in from thousands of miles away, not all of it anyway, and with what might get in, you sure ain't gonna wanna pay them prices.
I don't think you can place an adequate $ price on that, that can address the main issue there.. That's why I think nations as a rule should first always make sure they are completely indpendent on food and fresh water and energy supply and a nice bare minimum manufacturing, it is just too critical for national security to ignore or to "farm" it out to another nation, even if it involves protectionism to some degree. Human necessities SHOULD be protected, other products, just "wants" and luxuries, sure, let the market determine what gets done where, no problems there much from my POV as long as the tariffs are equitable.