Okay, here’s the poop on cow power: Dairy farmers from Wisconsin to Vermont are learning that they – and their bovine partners – can produce more than milk and manure. By converting the methane from cow patties into electricity, rural farms can provide their community with power – and in the process, eliminate the odors associated with dairy farming.

“The neighbors like it,” quips Steve Costello of the Central Vermont Public Service (CVPS)’s Cow Power program, which supplies 4,000 customers with the help of  6,000 cows. “You can have a barbecue on the Fourth of July without worrying the dairy farm next door is going spread some manure and wipe everyone out!”

Much more than that, of course, are the ecological benefits of using cow power:

• It’s a renewable energy source, not a dirty or fossil-fuel fed one (half of the energy used in the U.S. comes from coal).

• It reduces methane emissions, which are more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, trapping more heat in the atmosphere pound per pound.

• The final, solid product – after a process that includes a “digester” which breaks down the chemicals and bacteria, while the methane is trapped to generate electricity – can be used for bedding that is similar to straw, which typically has to be trucked in. (Once soiled, the bedding can be recycled yet again – returned to the digester and covnerted to topsoil or sold as fertilizer.

• Farmers use the slurry product that comes out the other end of the process, so to speak, to fertilize their fields, but with much less danger of spreading bacteria and toxins into the soil when they spread their manure.

• The digester itself kills most of the pathogens found in maure, includin E coli.

• Bonus fact: One cow can keep two 100-watt lightbulbs lit 24 hours a day, presumably in perpetuity.

“You’re taking a huge amount of waste out of the stream, if you will,” says Costello, explaining that CVPS started Cow Power in 2005 and is one of four such programs in Vermont.

“Nationally, cow power may not work so well – you’re talking about cows, so it’s typically got to be in rural areas – but it replaces dirty energy when it can. And a lot of our farms are using the heat left over from the generator to heat water for cleaning – supplanting either propane or number two, heating oil. That’s thousands of gallons that they’re not burning.”

Cows: An electric idea

Costello is an enthusiastic promoter of cow poo as energy, but out in Waterloo, Wisconsin, Crave Brothers Farms is helping their cattle reach their ultimate potential: To make dairy products, while converting their poop into energy for their home and cheese factory, as well as hundreds of Wisconsin homes. (Crave cows produce 650 KW per hour, which can power 550 households).

Mark Crave, who has come in from his 1,800-acre spread to talk on the phone, says the idea isn’t a new one to the family, which produces Farmstead Classics brand cheeses. He and his three brothers own and run the farm, along with their combined 12 offspring, and some of their offspring. He says there are a number of reasons why the family has jumped on the poop train, not the least of which is that, once through the digesters and generators and presses, their cow manure has almost totally eliminated the need to buy commercial fertilizers. The Craves like that, financially and ecologically.

The brothers started their poop power program about three years ago, although elder brother Charles Crave had been contemplating it since he founded the farm/cheese factory in 1981.

“It’s something that’s always been on our radar. We grew up on a dairy farm about 60 miles from here. My dad loved farming and he loved innovating. He oftentimes, when we were growing up,  would take us to farming trade shows and on field trips. And in the car on the way home , he’d say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that something?’ Or ‘What if we tried this?’ … Having four of us around, we were constantly kicking that ball aorund, if you will: How to change things, how to improve things. … Charles was always interested in (cow power), but until recently, there weren’t that many options. The only system that was in place was  farmer-engineered, as I like to call it. Built by the operators.

“The system we have is actually owned by Clear Horizons – an offshoot of a large electricity contractor in Milwaukee,” Crave says. “They’re looking at green energy as a growth industry. … But our motivation for doing it was that it allows us to better manage the nutrients in our soil. It changes how those nutrients escape into the system, so we can actually apply them to our fields. … It hasn’t saved us any money – yet. The initial capital outlay is more than $1 million. But we expect to (recoup) in about ten years.” (Note: The Craves send their energy to a power utility and then buy it back to power their farm.)

In addition to having 1,100 cows and 900 head of young stock – with a total of 950 milking cows – the Crave family grow corn, soybeans and alfalfa. (They also make an allegedly killer cheddar). And when it comes to fertilizing their crops, they, like all farmers, have limits on the amount of phosphorus (which fertilizer contains) that can be put into the soil.

“Most of the phosphorus (translation: fertilizer) that’s in manure is in the solid portion of the manure,” Crave says, explaining why dairy farmers spread their cows’ poo over their fields (thus the potential July Fourth stink-out), to create a better yield.  ”Our cow manure,  as it goes into the system, is 12 percent solid. Once it goes through this digestion process – which takes anywhere from three to four weeks’ retention time in the digester – it changes byproducts like nitrogen from an organic to a mineral state, and that makes it (nitrogen) less volatile. So that means It’s more stable in the soil, so it doesn’t leach out with rain.

“But by doing this, we’re also able to better manage the nutrients in our soils,” Crave adds. “The number one limit for applying manure to our cropland is phosphorus. Historically, before we had the digester, when we would go apply manure to the soil, when we reached our limit, we’d have to test it. … Now, we can apply manure as fertilizer at whatever rate that crop will use, and we can meet our fertilizer needs without having to to buy commercial fertilizer. It (the whole process) allows us to separate our manure into different components, where we can use it.” And literally recycle it!

Here’s essentially how it works: The cow’s manure is routed to anaerobic “digester”, which is kept around 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 20-30 days. Bacteria break down the waste, producing, among other things, methane gas, which builds up pressure in the digester. Next, the biogas is delivered through a pipe into a modified natural gas engine, which in turn fuels the engine, making it spin the generator, creating electricity.

In addition, as Mark Crave explains it, “when the manure comes out of the digester we put it into a screw press and separate out about half of the solids. What we do with those solids is multiple-use: Number one, those solids (which, pressed, become thin, fibrous organic compound – voila cow “straw”) go back into the barn and are put into the stalls.  It’s a very inert product that has very little odor, it’s very much like green sawdust and in fact probably has less of a small than even sawdust. It’s a fluffy, very loose laying product, and the cows just love to lay in it.”

What remains after that bedding is used, is again recycled using the digester, and can be sold as potting soil.

“It’s basically a closed loop system,” says Crave.

Who knew poop had so many positive qualities?

(Photo credits: Blue Spruce Farm — Steve Dvorak, left, and Melissa Dvorak, right, talk with Eral Audte and David Dunn at Blue Spruce Farm while the separator behind them takes solids out of the liquid manure after it is digested, so the liquid can be used as fertilizer and the solids used as animal bedding; Earl Audet, left, co-owner of Blue Spruce farm, and David Dunn, program Manager for CVPS Cow Power^TM, examine dry solids left over from the digestion process.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

It’s already mid-March and that means the snows will melt and if the ground’s not too saturated farmers will soon be planting seeds for the food that will feed us this year.

Since time immemorial farmer’s markets have been with us: farmers harvest, bakers bake, dairy farmers milk their cows and they all meet at a central location where there’s lots of foot traffic … and they sell. The common theme: the food is fresh.

In addition to the standard organic fruits, vegetables and eggs, farmer’s markets offer items you wouldn’t usually consider: hand-made brooms, herbs, bath and body care products, lobster rolls, wine, organic teas and “traditional handcrafted leather goods and repair”, rabbits, natural and dyed yarn and spinning supplies, photographs of local scenes, elk and moose meat, organic spice blends and increasingly, fresh fish.

1. It’s locally grown

Most but not all Farmer’s Markets in the US require vendors to have grown, produced or crafted what they sell at the market. Most vendors are small, one- or two-person operations and they grow only what they can manage. They grow what’s in season and it’s local. Ask the farmer if they grew what they’re selling, ask if it’s organic. Don’t buy until you’re satisfied with their answers.

2. You know the farmer personally

You know where the farm family lives; you’ve seen their farm, your children go to school with their children, you see each other at church or at Little League games or at a movie. You know the farmer and you trust him. He’s a neighbor.

3. It’s where the chefs and restaurateurs shop for fresh produce and baked goods

Patrick Soucy, chef at a Portsmouth, N.H. restaurant that specializes in New American cuisine, buys at the local farmer’s markets because of the “better health, better quality” of the food.

“And the produce defines ‘tree-ripened’. It’s fresh. ”

Raj, chef at an Indian restaurant in southern Maine, buys there “because it’s local, within a 20-mile radius. It didn’t come here from California. Also, I support the local community.”

4. Prices are often cheaper than supermarkets

… but not always. Organically-grown and the small-operation produce is very labor-intensive. Individually planted by hand, individually nurtured during the growing process and then individually harvested by hand obviously takes a tremendous amount of time. But the local farmer doesn’t have the tremendous labor, mortgage, transportation and other expenses of a supermarket, so cost comparisons show that all-in-all the farmer’s market sells food for less than a supermarket.

5. There’s less of a carbon footprint: field to farm

What about the bananas at a supermarket in America that come from El Salvador, the berries from Chile, and the kiwis from Australia … how can they possibly be their freshest when they were harvested so early in their growth process and they grew older on their journey? Local produce usually travels less than 10 miles from field to market. Take a bite from a store-bought peach and then take a bite from a locally-grown peach. As chef Patrick Soucy says, “I needed five napkins to wipe my mouth after biting the locally-grown peach”.

Marin County dairy farmer Albert Straus started moving toward a “slower” way of doing business back in 1994, when his family-owned farm, Straus Family Creamery, became the only organic dairy west of the Mississippi.

Straus, whose organic ice cream will be scooped out at the Ice Cream Pavilion at Slow Food Nation, has been producing organic milk, yogurt, butter and ice cream under the family name ever since. Straus grew up on his father’s conventional dairy farm in Marshall, California, a town so small it had a one-room schoolhouse, on the shores of Tomales Bay in western Marin County, 60 miles north of San Francisco. He joined the farm as a partner in 1977 and made the risky, but prescient decision to transition the operation from conventional to organic in the early 1990s.

“Someone approached me about doing organic milk for ice cream,” Straus said in an interview in a makeshift conference room above his dairy. “I had no clue what it was. It took me three-and-a-half years to figure out what “organic” meant. No one else was doing it. There was one small co-op in Wisconsin, Organic Valley, but that was it.”

As he transitioned his farm, Straus found out what organic meant – not just by definition, but also in terms of how he had to change his approach to farming. To be a California Certified Organic dairy, Straus said, the land has to be free of herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertizliers for at least three years. The cows have to go through at least a year transition with no hormones, no antibiotics and all-organic feeds.

Translated to day-to-day dairy farming, Straus said it meant, “Learning how to treat the animals without antibiotics and hormones, what homeopathy was, how to make it workable, where to find and produce organic feeds, how to market our products, build a plant, and get financing. We transitioned the whole farm. Organic feeds cost twice as much as conventional feeds, so it was a very expensive and risky time,” he said. “The Small Business Adminstration wouldn’t give me money without taking all my parents’ land and my sister’s house as collateral, so I got going by taking loans from family members and friends, and leasing a lot of equipment.”

But Straus also quickly learned what organic meant for his business. In terms of economics, he said, “We’ve grown double digits every year for last 14 years,” he said.

Straus doesn’t believe growth is the only way to profitability. In fact, he’s the perfect poster boy for the Slow Food mantra that bigger isn’t necessarily better. “This has been my challenge,” he said. “In order to keep a viable farm, you need to have an operation that is profitable and sustainable with the resources you have and not be forced to get bigger and bigger.”

Straus said with about 300 milking cows on 660 acres, his creamery is considered a small, regional processor, and he likes that just fine. “We’d like to keep most of our products local, to keep a quality and a freshness for consumers who know where their milk comes from, how it’s processed, what our philosophy is, and who want to support that. We don’t want to go cross-country unless we have to,” he said.

His operation employs about 70 people in the creamery and six in the dairy. In a walk through the small creamery, we saw the stainless-steel vats where yogurt is made and set, and how it’s piped over to the brand-new yogurt-filling machine, plopped into containers, moved on a conveyor belt to the capper, then boxed by workers and sent to the walk-in or put on delivery trucks.

We got to peer into the 1950s-style butter churn, which makes award-winning butter so yellow it was once disqualified from a national butter contest because the judges were convinced it was artificially colored. (It isn’t.) VP of Sales and Marketing Rich Martin said Straus butter is the only butter Slow Food Nation founder and chef Alice Waters uses in her famous Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, because of its high percentage of butterfat to moisture.

We saw the milk-bottle capper and the ice-cream makers. (Had we been there on a Thursday, we could have tasted fresh ice cream right out of the machine, but since it was Monday, we had to settle for taking part in sampling the first-ever Straus frozen yogurt, a product in development for the gourmet frozen yogurt shop market.)

Straus said his creamery is developing a sustainability model around reusable packaging, energy independence, and land stewardship. The dairy products are packaged on site, put on trucks, and sold mainly on the West Coast. Much of Straus Family Creamery’s milk is packaged in bottles made of 40 to 50 percent recycled glass, Straus said. Consumers pay a bottle deposit, which is returned when they bring them back to store. “The same trucks that deliver pick up the empties and bring them back, where we wash them, sanitize them and reuse them. We get six to eight uses out of a bottle,” Straus said.

Cows supply a constant source of methane gas, which comes in handy if you have the equipment to trap it and use it to power your farm. Straus does.

“In our methane digester, we digest and capture the waste from the cows, and produce 90% of electricity and about half of our hot water needs,” Straus said. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA), methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than C02, so what Straus said is true: “We’re doing our part by keeping it from going into the atmosphere.” Not to mention the fact that less methane means fewer odors, and fewer flies – a win-win-win for humans, cows, and planet.

Keeping the land in farming is a cornerstone of Straus’ sustainability model, and a concept that his mother, Ellen Straus, championed. In the 1970s, when the future of the region was being threatened by developers eyeing the coastal access and million-dollar views, Ellen Straus co-founded the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), a unique alliance between Marin ranchers and environmentalists. Through restrictive zoning, land use regulations, active support for ranching by County government, and MALT’s agricultural conservation easement program, MALT has bought the development rights to 47 ranches and dairies covering more than 32,000 acres — about a quarter of privately-owned farmland in the county – which keeps the land in agriculture in perpetuity.

“It’s something that’s been lost around the globe,” Straus said of family farmland. “We’re losing five percent of our family farms every year. This is what Slow Food is trying to promote: global heritage of farming and food that reflects those values.”

Straus said he thinks his business has been successful in showing that organic dairy farming can be profitable and sustainable.

“Organic farming is the wave of the future. For many years I was the only organic dairy in Marin County. In the last couple years we now have about a quarter of dairies in Marin County that are certified organic. I think more and more farms are starting to understand what it takes to do this, and that this is how they can survive.”

(Photo credits: Albert Straus and Equipment/Catherine Girardeau; Cow/Straus Dairy)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media