Stewardship

Farm Unleashes Cow Power: Methane from animal waste being put to good use in various ways

Story by: Robyn L. Minor, The Bowling Green Daily News

An experiment at Western Kentucky University to reduce the odor from cow manure and find other uses for the waste could lead to a permanent facility that produces enough electricity to power most of the university’s farm.

Organic Alchemy's David Emmerich (from left), assistant WKU farm manager David Newsom and Nathan DeKemper, a student farm worker, talk about the organic alchemy greenhouse at the farm.

Photo by: Miranda Pederson The Bowling Green Daily News

Right now, farm workers take the manure from just two cows, mix it with water and put it into a digester, which ciruclates the liquid from a tank and through eight other containers floating in a pond below the bed of a greenhouse. After 21 days, the end product is something with little to no smell that can be sprayed on fields for fertilizer, according to David Emmerich of Organic Alchemy in Smiths Grove, who developed and patented the digester.

Now, the methane produced from the digesting process is burned off about once a month, but in a larger scale operation the gas could actually be used to produce electricity, Emmerich said.

On Thursday, the interior of the greenhouse was relatively warm - warm enough without electric-generated heat for winter plants. The circulation of the liquid waste through tanks warms the surrounding water to about 85 degrees, according to David Newsom, assistant farm manager for Western.

“We’ve got this warm pond, we may as well use it,” said Newsom, who would like to grow tilapia in the water. “Then we’d have a fish fry for farm workers.”

Click here for the rest of the article.

Organic Alchemy Looks to Turn Waste into Energy (Daniel Kemp, WBKO) (Click on the article for video and full story.)

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