Checking in on manure digesters
In front of the Five Star Dairy’s biodigester near Eau Claire, Michael Vickerman holds the digestion’s fiberous residue that can be spread on fields for fetilizer or used for bedding and other products.
From an article by John Oncken in The Capital Times:
Almost 14,000 individual family-owned dairy farms are the foundation for Wisconsin’s $20 billion dairy industry. They are also major recyclers of the raw materials they use, as nearly all of the grain, forage and supplements consumed by a cow to make milk are recycled by the farmer as fertilizer to make crops grow.
In addition to the daily application of manure directly to farm fields, there are 18 manure digesters at work on larger Wisconsin dairy farms with about that many under construction or in advanced planning.
The Statz Brothers dairy in Sun Prairie is nearing completion of a manure digester for their 1,500-cow main dairy. Norm-E-Lane Farm at Chili in Clark County is in the final phases of construction of a digester for their 1,500-cow dairy. Bach Farm in Dorchester as well as Grotegut Dairy and Mapleleaf Dairy, both in Cleveland, have just received U.S. Department of Agriculture Renewable Energy grants and loans to build digesters.
Those dairy farms with digesters are producing solids used for livestock bedding and fertilizer and methane gas that powers generators to make electricity for homes. The cost of a manure digester system is well in the six figure category, most of it borne by the dairy family making for lots of tough decisions.
What about manure digesters for small farms?
Major discussions have been held about building central manure digesters in Dane County. The central challenges are determining who will pay the high cost of building them and figuring how to get the manure from individual farms to the central digester.
There is one, in Chino, Calif., where a dozen dairies pay the electric utility to haul and process their manure. But this is an area where cows are housed in open corrals on dairies located side-by-side, a very short distance from the digester. Wisconsin dairy farms are located farther apart and the cost of hauling manure great distances (it’s mostly water) is currently prohibitive.
