Lets Jump Together

We have all heard about cow manure and how much methane gas it produces.

Until now there has been no way to capture this gas and use it - it was wasted into the atmosphere - contributing to the greenhouse effect on the planet.

Listening to NPR, as I enjoy doing, they were talking with a dairy farmer in Vermont who was doing just that - harvesting the methane gas.

He had set up a power house on his property that turns the cow manure and urine into methane.

The droppings are collected in the barn through a unique setup of pipes and tubes in the floor.  It gets transported through them up to the power house.

Once the cows got used to stepping over the pipes, the hard work was done.

Up in the power house, bacteria eats the manure which turns into methane.

This methane heats and powers the barn, farmhouse, and 40 other homes in the area.

Once the methane is harvested, the remains are allowed to dry out.

It drys into a flaky material that the farmer then uses as shavings for the barn floor.

He used to pay over $8000 a month for electricity - he now gets paid $2000 from the power company for the electricity he generates.

He used to pay over $7000 a month for shavings for the barn - that cost has also been eliminated as he uses the dried shavings from the power house.

I am sure it cost him a lot of money to build this power house, but his cost of operating the farm have been cut significantly, and eventually it should pay him to run it.

And that is the monetary cost - just think of the environmental savings we are gaining.

Now if more farms would go this route, what a difference it could make all the way around - for the farmer, for our homes, for our wallets, and best of all for our planet.