Let me say it straight out. I am not real hot on gentlemen farmers who prefer others get their hands dirty while they look at Norman Rockwell paintings on their walls of a time that never was. A time when happy cows frolicked in green meadows and happily gave their milk to tiny infants and playful children.
Such folks probably never milked a cow nor smelled much of the other stuff that cows produce. Norman Rockwell himself was a strangely cynical illusionist who would have shocked the pants off the 1950’s puritans if they knew he had used his mistress in his Saturday Evening Post covers.
When I was very young, going to a one-room school in high desert country, the older kids used to make fun of one pioneer lady who survived very harsh winters burning what she delicately called “buffalo chips.” Much nicer than calling them “cow pies” or that other word.
Even then it seemed a wonderment to me just as I was startled in my dotage when my doctor told me his small village in India got all its electricity from anaerobic digesters when he was growing up.
The tunnel-visioned “wind and solar” crowd that has lost peripheral vision much beyond hilarious “clean coal” or nuclear power that would poison the planet for eons or even stealing food from a hungry world to grow crops for ethanol might try to stop smelling the manure so many politicians produce in abundance and think about naure’s goodness while its still fresh.
Please to note the “fresh.” That is crucial. The residents of San Francisco who carry plastic doggy bags around to pick up their doggy’s poop are doing a fine thing. It is mighty fine the city of San Francisco wants to use the doggy poo for producing methane. But perhaps the planners don’t know 90% of the methane has escaped into the atmosphere. That methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon that is emitted by tailpipes and smokestacks burning fossil fuels. Probably be just as well to burn the dry cow pies, like the pioneer lady who gathered them up for heating and cooking.
Frolicking cows and pigs in the meadows can’t be prevented from belching and farting methane into the atmosphere though even that effluence can be reduced by medication. They can, however, be prevented from burning the grass and polluting the run-off with feces by utilizing that feces to produce fuel and fertilizer and fiber.
Fertilizer? Isn’t that what the happy livestock are extruding in the pleasant meadows?
Well yes and no. Fresh manure burns crops. The first anaerobic digesters devised centuries ago in southeast Asia were longitudinal boxes buried in the ground to produce an improved fertilizer. The methane produced was more a curiosity than a desired product.
Today’s more advanced technology can produce methane or ethanol in abundance and even some hydrogen.
But the cows and pigs and other livestock can’t run free amd frolic in the meadows like they do in the Norman Rockwell paintings.
Norman Rockwell must be loving it from where he is with his mistress. If that weren’t allowed up there, it wouldn’t be heaven.
Best, Terry
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when I had an animal sanctuary – actually rabbit and goat “berries” can be used fresh as fertilizer without burning. However, I hot composted horse and chicken manure, and after fully composting (where it helped to heat the animal barn in the winter), it was spread on pastures as fertilizer – worm rich, parasite free (from the free-range chickens’ clean-up) and relatively free of weed seeds from the cooking. Smelled sweet of fresh earth, and green pasture thrived on it.
I also installed geothermal heat for my home (horizontal loop), and switched light bulbs, used solar fence chargers – anything to get off the grid and to minimize fossil fuel use. No subsidies, no support and full retail price, but still worth it.
not a scientist, but am a composter and oraganic gardener of food. I once when I first bought my inner city house with Barn as I call it, (a 1914 garage) bought enough chicken shit to fill said barn. Said shit was however was hot from an organic farm. I had to let it cure, much to my neighbors concern for a long time. It worked out however and it built my raised beds beds. As my neighbor says you have the healthiest weeds around.
Please explain Digesters, how do they work etc. Another story during world war 11 my dad a young inventor and engineer converted his car to run on chicken shit. It seems to me with ingenuity we could solve two problems here the major problem of manure and Big Ags pollution plus our energy crisis. So do tell?