renewable energy from farming

Having spent most of my teenage years on our family farm in Ontario, Canada, I have a tendency to romanticise small-scale agriculture. When you work the farm as a family, with no hired labour, you are forced to work like the devil and confront your demons. It's no walk in the park, and it's certainly no way to get rich. Yet, for me, the cliches are largely true. Dependence on the soil, the plants and the rain, on healthy lambs and helpful neighbours - these things add perspective to life.

Yes, our voracious appetite for meat and dairy products is devouring land and other resources at a frightening rate, and if we don't change our ways, it looks like something's gonna give. So partly because of my own experience, which was little more than subsistence farming, and partly because of the concerns about agricultural impacts, I have an aversion to large-scale farms that seem more like factories than places where animals should live.

That said, I am intrigued by news of a dairy farm near London, Ontario, that must be about as efficient as a farm can be in making best use of available resources. The Stanton farm of 728 hectares has capacity to handle 2,000 cows, and at this scale the business can make use of technologies to improve sustainability performance that would be unaffordable to smaller farms.

The warm milk coming from the cows is cooled with a two-stage system that is unique in Canada. First, it is cooled as it passes next to water pumped up from deep wells. It is further cooled with a heat exchanger until it is 2 degrees C. The well water, which is warmed as it cools the milk, is used for three purposes: to water the cows, to clean the milking equipment, and to supply a radiant in-floor heating system.

The Stantons are constructing a $4.5 million anaerobic digester that will produce methane from cow manure. At full capacity, the farm will have the capacity to produce 300 kilowatts of power, and could increase output by using manure from other farms or waste from commercial food plants. Solids left over after the methane gas is extracted can be used as animal bedding or a peat moss substitute, and the liquid can be used as organic fertilizer. If the biogas wasn't harvested and converted to useful energy, the manure would produce methane anyway, contributing to global warming.

The farmer's consultant, Gary Fortune, believes the biogas could become a significant source of farm income, with the potential to reduce material going to landfills if waste food and other organic products are collected instead of dumped; but under the Ontario government's alternative energy plan, biogas producers get 11 cents a kilowatt hour, compared to 42 cents for solar. This discrepancy makes it hard to compete.

[via London Free Press. Thanks, D.]

[Update on 12 Feb 2008: In South Africa, Agama Technology has installed a biogas digester on a farm outside Pietermaritzburg. The process is less automated than the Ontario example, but it achieves the same thing on a smaller scale at a fraction of the cost: R50,000, or $6,400 (Canadian) at today's exchange rate. According to today's Business Report, Dave Alcock, a consultant to Agama, "piloted the concept seven years ago in KwaZulu Natal at a house and school at eNdwedwe, just outside eThekwini." Interestingly, the school project failed because "there were people who felt that if it was successful, then the community would never be connected to the Eskom grid and the electricity generated from biogas would not be enough for everyone."]

Comments

[Gwen Layton]

Hi,
I'm a member of the Uxbridge Energy Conservation Advisory Committee and we're planning some renewable energy workshops directed toward the farm community because we think renewable energy has so much potential on the farm. Would you know how I could contact Gary Fortune or anyone else involved with the Stanton farm, so we could get some real information from a real farmer?

[Rory]

Sorry Gwen, but I haven't been in Ontario for two years, so all I know about the Stanton farm is what I read in the London paper. I suggest you contact the people at Agama (see link above). If you're lucky they will know of other Canadian examples, but at the very least they have firsthand experience with installing biogas systems on farms, and may have information of interest to you.

And here is a link to an NGO site in Lesotho (Technologies for Economic Development) that lists a whole raft of resources that may be of use, including organisations in a number of different countries.

I would be very interested in hearing how you progress with your workshops. Creating awareness of the options is a vital step. I would be happy to be able to report on progress. As you say, it does seem to have great potential.