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Posted on 04/26/2007 6:47:55 AM PDT by MplsSteve
Greg Langmo likes to say he was just a "fat, dumb and happy turkey farmer" until the summer of 1998. That's when he walked into a meeting of the Meeker County Board and got blindsided by a courthouseful of riled-up residents.
The mounds of manure he and other turkey growers were stockpiling on their farms to sell as fertilizer had become a nuisance, seemingly overnight.
"They said, 'It smells, it creates runoff, it collects flies,' " said Langmo, 48, who raises about a million turkeys a year on his farms near Litchfield. "The commissioners told me to solve the problem or they'd solve it for me."
Langmo placed an S.O.S. call to a British company he'd read about that was turning poultry litter into electricity. Nine years later, his solution has arrived: a $225 million plant an hour away in Benson that will turn poop into power.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
It eliminates a source of pollution, will help save rivers and creeks from run-off and best of all, creates electricity.
Since this plant is not fully operational yet, the jury is still out - and may be out for some time yet.
But it's a start.
Opinions or comments - anyone?
Renewable Energy PING?
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Why, that’s just offal...........
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How do they get that stuff through the wires?
My immediate reservation is, which is more useful, good organic fertilizer, or renewable energy? I suspect that the most efficient use of these turkey droppings is for fertilizer. If they want to build renewable energy plants, better to use landfills, which otherwise have no productive use.
Everyone’s a conservationist, as long as it’s not in their back yard. Maybe they shouldn’t have built their yuppie houses next to a turkey farm.
I also think of all the pooh from hog,cow and horse farms.
If we really can make energy from a whole lot of crap...Washington DC could be epicenter....
Turkey droppings grandfathered in, I hope ...
City slickers are clueless. They probably bought their houses in winter when the windows were closed.
My grandmother used to get fresh chicken droppings from the local chicken farm and spread them on her gardens in November. Those droppings were so hot the marigolds were still blooming in February.
‘Renewable Stink’ also applies.
There is a turkey poop into liquid fuel plant someplace here in the Show Me. Its also reported that the place smells pretty bad.
You have a chicken s*it sense of humor.
Regarding cow manure, there are some larger dairy operations that have built anaerobic digestors.
They produce a decent amount of power that enables them to run their operations free from the local power co-op.
Some of these dairy operations have occasionally sold excess power to the local co-ops.
The up-front money for building the digestor can be daunting - but they do pay for themselves within a few years.
It comes from a mind full of fowl language..........
Plop! Plop! Fizz! Fizz! Oh what a relief it is!.............
Ouch.
What happens to the plant when some bird virus shuts down the turkey farms?
A legitimate question.
I don’t really know.
I think that fertilizer is a by product, but the nitrogen has been burned out. One day these nincompoops who got so exercised about runoff from agriculture are going to wake up and wonder why algae blooms on the ocean are down. They are the source of most oxygen and feed on nitrogen from runoff.
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