Going Green: Not letting the waste go to waste

by YNN Terry Ettinger

These dairy cows produce a lot of manure. Each cow produces around 14 gallons of effluent per day but Morrisville State College is not letting the waste go to waste.

"The whole idea is to burn the gas off before it gets up in the atmosphere because cows are some of the greatest polluters, other than the automobile. We're catching all the gas off the effluent and using it to generate electricity that in turn runs the farm," said Doug Trew, Morrisville College Acting Dairy Farm Manager.

The gravity-flow system, designed for 400 milking cows, takes the manure from the barn to a pumping station that pushes it through tanks buried under an insulating earth cover where the manure is kept at the magic temperature of 98 degrees.

"As long as you maintain the temperature within the system the anaerobic microorganisms produce the methane that's used to generate the electricity," said Dr. Walid Shayya, Professor of Natural Resource Engineering.

The methane gas is piped to an internal combustion engine that generates electricity. The system is producing an average of 900-kilowatt hours of electricity per day.

So over a year we produce 330,000 kilowatt-hours, which translates into a value of about $35,000. That's a nice benefit but there are also maintenance costs, operational costs that play into the equation but I believe there are going to be economic benefits to the system but the question is how long it will take to pay for the system.

The Morrisville digester system, installed in 2007, cost $900,000 so it will be awhile paying for itself, where a system on a larger farm, say 2,000 cows, would pay off much faster.

But there's another benefit small farms might want to consider. Professor Shayya says in addition to producing electricity and hot water, the methane digester reduces the odor of manure so it can be stored without offending the neighbors and then used as fertilizer when it will do the most good.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• small farms
• digester
• NRCS
• USDA
• Farm Bill
• Funding
• EQIP

[Lima547]

Nice video! Thanks for sharing!