Ellington dairy farm turns manure into natural gas - WTNH.com
Ellington dairy farm turns manure into natural gas
ELLINGTON, Conn. (WTNH) — An Ellington dairy farm is now producing more than just milk. Farmer Seth Bahler is using technology to turn what his cows leave behind into natural gas.
The milk that comes out of Oakridge Farm‘s dairy cows has a lot of great uses. The other stuff that comes out of the cows did not have many uses, until now. The 70,000 pounds of manure produced on the farm every day now gets turned into natural gas. It turns out a cow’s stomach only extracts about 75% of the energy from its food.
“The other 25% left is actually passing through and comes out as manure,” Bahler explained.
Bahler knows what he’s talking about. He’s a fifth-generation dairy farmer. Oakridge Dairy Farm sends the manure from the barn through underground pipes into a newly-operational methane digester. That huge, two-million-gallon tank replicates a cow’s stomach.
“There’s micro bugs in there that are eating all that energy, turning it into methane gas,” said Bahler.
The farm has its own on-site refinery that turns that methane into pipeline-grade natural gas. They estimate they’ll make enough to power 800-900 cars a year.
The methane digester is impressive technology, but there are lots of other ways Oakridge is using technology to make the environment, and the cows, as healthy as possible.
“We have cow Fitbits. Basically, they are collars for our cows,” explained farm worker Kaylee Hill. “They stay on them 24/7 and it monitors their rumination. It monitors when they’re walking around, when they’re lying down, when they eat. Basically, anything a cow is doing it tells us what is going on.”
Cows are milked on a robotic carousel system and the barns are covered in solar panels. It’s a long way from the way Bahler’s great-great-grandfather did things.
“Some of their greatest inventions was going from a horse to a tractor,” Bahler said. “You know, we’ve come a long ways.
“The digester just opened and needs about three weeks to properly digest, but soon, tankers will fill up at the refinery. Eventually, the farm will be hooked up to a natural gas pipeline.
Related Knowledge Center: Methane
As the production of natural gas from shale fields has expanded, so have methane emissions. U.S. methane emissions grew 27 percent from 1990 to 2009, according to the Energy Information Administration. Methane contributes about 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.