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March 06, 2006
Poo-Power
I was surprised and disappointed to read today in the New York Times that the idea of generating power from animal waste was nothing more than a load of manure. I'm disappointed because I consider myself a pretty balanced person when it comes to environmentally sustainable energy. I replaced all the bulbs in my apartment with energy savers, installed a digital thermostat, and I recycle too. So all that being said, I guess the idea of generating energy from poo just sounded so cool that I thought it must be a good thing.
Enter Nicolette Hahn Niman, a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer with her OP-ED article in the Times. Apparently power from manure, while sounding like a great idea, actually creates more problems than it solves. The most obvious of the problems is that even after being used to generate fuel, the manure still remains. The second problem is that it takes a lot of manure to make power generation even feasible which means that it's corporate factory farms that benefit since family farmers use the manure as fertilizer.
Traditional farms, which usually both grow plants and raise animals, recycle manure as organic fertilizer and thus bear the full cost of handling their waste. But large livestock operations can't do that. They put their manure -- and there is a great deal of it -- in huge piles or storage pools that often leak into nearby streams and ground water and exude stenches that make life miserable for neighbors. For them, manure isn't valuable fertilizer but a vexing disposal problem. While it's a nuisance on factory farms, manure as it is used on traditional farms greatly benefits soil fertility and tilth, increasing water-holding capacity, reducing wind erosion, improving aeration and promoting beneficial organisms.
And the last thing that was surprising to me is that the cost of building manure power plants is so expensive that the costs are often subsidized by the government.
Creating energy from manure sounds like a great idea, but in the end it doesn't really solve any problems it is supposed to fix. Problems like too much manure on too little land and the ground, water, and air pollution that results.
Manure isn't the problem anyway, factory farming is.
Posted by at March 6, 2006 04:40 PM
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Comments
As a teen I helped my midwest farm bound cousins build a chicken manure digester. It was about the size of a pick up truck and was made of wood and some sort of sealed plastic cell. There was a spigot too, to vent off the methane the thing produced. I can't remember anything more special than letting the thing sit in the hot sun for a while and then venting off the methane which we had great fun burning. As part of a VoAg project, though, I think at the time--mid 80's--there was a lot of interest in this sort of backyard technology among farmers.
I don't remember what happened to the thing after the county fair, but the point is that Poo Power should be used. First extract the heat, methane and energy out of the stuff and then use it as fertilizer. They are both compatible uses. Furthermore, by adding EM's--efficient microbes--from Japan you can reduce the toxic odors while improving the manure's uses as fertilizer and presumably fuel of some sort.
Nevertheless, I agree--remove the "factory" from the "farm" and balance will be restored--manure can be used as fertilizer instead of piling up and by diversifying there won't be as much manure to pile up--even while the same amounts of food are being produced.
Posted by: Podchef at March 6, 2006 05:05 PM | Useful? Then Digg It.