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Ohio farms planning to use cows, chickens to generate energy
Some Ohio farmers receive $500,000 from the USDA to cover part of the cost of a methane digester.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
It won't be long before 580,000 chickens and 3,800 dairy cows become among the first animals in Ohio to help generate electricity.
Wenning Poultry in Mercer County, home to the chickens, and Bridgewater Dairy in Williams County, home to the cows, are in the process of installing methane digesters.
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Chris Weaver, whose family owns and operates Bridgewater Dairy, said the methane digester captures methane in the manure, which is then converted into electricity.
The process reduces the manure's smell as well.
"More of our neighbors will take it for fertilizer (on their fields) because the people who live near their farms won't complain that it smells," Weaver said.
The family hopes to have the methane digester operating by year's end.
"It'll produce about 30 percent more energy than we'll actually use," Weaver said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to chip in $500,000 of the roughly $2 million that each digester costs, said Randy Monhemius, USDA business program specialist.
In addition to the projects at Bridgewater Dairy and Wenning Poultry, the USDA has approved another $500,000 for a manure digester at Harrison Ethanol, which intends to house 10,000 beef cattle and 2,000 dairy cows at a new farm in Harrison County. Federal funding for the three projects totals $1.5 million.
The state Department of Development has set aside $1.5 million in 2008-09 specifically for digesters in areas served by investor-owned utilities such as DP&L, said department spokeswoman Nikki Jaworski.
Next to labor, energy is the largest single operating cost on many farms, and energy usage on farms is expected to increase 20 percent or more in the next 20 years, said Dale Arnold, the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation's energy services director. Farmers are looking for ways to control those costs, he said.
But renewable energy doesn't just have implications for farmers, Arnold said. Farms could one day contribute power that could be used by other utility customers during times of peak energy demand.
"That's going to help the entire community," Arnold said.
Dayton Power and Light Co. has eight customers currently connected to the utility's grid, spokesman Tom Tatham said. Those customers, which generate power from solar and wind sources, provide roughly enough power to run a McDonald's restaurant.
