permaculture

[Lora Boge <loraboge@phreego.com>]

Thanks for all the info Mike,

I'll have fun at the digestion listserv I'm sure.

I'm just looking at self-sufficiency initially but I went to 2 lectures on 
farmers
getting into this stuff at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair and I grew up in 
Iowa. When
you grow up around mountains of cow manure, etc. you just naturally think 
that something
useful ought to be done with it. I've shovelled my share of all the major 
animal
varieties of it! I'm not on a farm now but still it seems like a vastly 
underused
resource somehow...Lora


Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

> Doug and Lora--
>
> Manure effluent does contain a lot of CO2, plus traces of other gases. A 
> good
> overview and assay can be found here:
>
> http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/factsheets/ab5.html
>
> I think the basic point to most collection-digester systems is that by
> containing the manure for a period, usually around twenty days, you capture 
> the
> gases that usually escape into the air, making your animal operation 
> possibly
> obnoxious to your neighbors or to yourself.
>
> A sensible approach, if you're thinking of building one yourself, is to 
> start
> with a solids separator-- a sieve or slat system that will allow the urine 
> to
> be collected separately. I would just batch the manure itself into the
> digester. If you have large amounts of rotten vegetables, like unsold 
> pumpkins,
> lying around you can use them. But don't bother to put straw or grass 
> clippings
> in. They have very little potential for outgassing, and have better uses 
> around
> the farm.
>
> Depending on the size of your operation, you can collect and pipe enough for
> your cooking needs, and possibly for heating your water. But if you want to
> heat a Wisconsin farmhouse in winter, I think you'll need a lot of cows.
>
> Down here at NCSU the guys in the lab coats have looked very closely at
> biogas for the past few years. I think the consensus is that even in a very
> concentrated operation (they're looking at CAFO's like pig, turkey and 
> chicken farms)
> it doesn't really pay to develop a system around gas sales. They're looking
> at other directions in post-manure products, like high protein animal feeds.
> Black soldier fly larva would be an example. If you want to check out one 
> of the
> really good research schools on the subject, start here:
>
> http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/an_sci/annrep95/swine/swin9514.html
>
> http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/publicat/wqwm/ebae071_80.html
>
> http://www.hydroponics.com.au/back_issues/issue59.html
>
> http://www.epa.gov/agstar/pdf/ag_fund_doc.pdf
>
> Finally, here's something from the middle of a long conversation on another
> list about the subect. Scroll forward or backward and you can find much 
> useful
> info:
>
> http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/digestion/2004-May/000406.html
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