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Innovation

Photos: Barnyard energy

By Bill Detwiler April 9, 2006, 9:00 PM PDT Bill Detwiler on Twitter billdetwiler

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Thermophilic digester
Thermophilic digester
Photos: Barnyard energy

Five Star Dairy

Five Star Dairy in Elk Mound, Wisc., installed a thermophilic digester about a year ago. Its 900 cows provide enough manure to generate enough power for about 600 homes.

Five Star Dairy
Photos: Barnyard energy

Five Star owner and General Manager Lee Jensen. Five Star sells the biogas produced by the digester to a utility. It will take about 10 years for the revenue from gas sales to pay off the digester, he said, but in the meantime, the farm can cut costs in other ways. The liquids at the end of the process can be used as fertilizer while the solids are comfy cow beds. Neither the liquids nor cow beds smell nearly as bad as the manure did the first time around.

Photos: Barnyard energy

An aerial shot of Five Star. Yes, the digester is a pretty sizeable building to construct.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Farmers check out the post-digester manure. Five Star says that cows actually prefer to sleep on manure over grass and it blows around less than hay.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Here’s a shot of a digester on the Wild Rose Dairy in Wisconsin. This farm sells the biogas generated by the digester to a utility. A large eight-digester project in Texas will produce a billion cubic feet of gas a year when complete.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Biogas from the manure digester is fed into a generator (the yellow thing), which provides about 700 kilowatts of the electricity required at California’s Joseph Gallo Farms, a major cheesemaker. The heat from the generator is then captured and used to run the boiler (the silver thing) that powers the boilers, where cheese is made.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Guess what’s under the tarp? Seven acres of fresh cow manure. Gallo right now has a mesophilic, or ambient temperature, digester. The company, however, is also building a thermophilic one that creates energy by heating manure up to 130 degrees and mixing in the right microbes.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Manure separator. No, that’s not a sun deck up there.

Photos: Barnyard energy

Moooo! This thermophilic digester at the Five Star Dairy in Wisconsin transforms cow manure and other waste products in 21 days into biogas. The farm doesn’t smell nearly as bad after one of these goes in, according to Lee Jensen of the Five Star.

Photos: Barnyard energy

After the Five Star began to turn manure into gas, it invited farmers from the region to check it out. Because of the costs associated with managing manure, demand is growing.

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By Bill Detwiler
Bill Detwiler is the Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and previous host of TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show.
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