Green Acres Meets Green Technology
Out on the farm, some things never change.
It doesn’t take any more imagination today than it did 50 years ago, for example, to figure out what stinks about thousands of cows.
But the technological leaps of the 21st century have not leap-frogged the agriculture industry. Farmers are getting savvy about how they deal with the growing pains of a successful herd. And they’re going the green route.
Norm-E-Lane Farms is home to one of the latest and greatest earth-saving gadgets: an anaerobic digester, more commonly known on the farm as a cow stomach.
Simply put, cow manure goes into the device, is converted to biogas over a period of many days, and the methane in the biogas is burned to generate electricity – quite a lot of electricity, in fact. The dairy farm is currently producing and selling back to the local utility company enough electricity to power roughly 500 homes.
The odor is completely eliminated because all of the cow waste is used, and the contraption also yields top-quality liquid fertilizer and animal bedding.
“It’s a great innovation, especially for odor reduction, which is becoming more and more of an issue,” says Jeremy Meissner, co-owner of the family farm with his father, uncle and cousin.
Norm-E-Lane’s cow stomach is only one of many ways in which the face of agriculture is changing. The industry is rising to the demands of an economy that wants more output faster and with less waste.
“If everything worked out the way I envision it, Marshfield would be powered by cows,” says Brad Guse, a vice president and agricultural lender at M&I Bank who also serves as chair of the Marshfield Area Chamber of Commerce & Industry’s agribusiness committee. “It could happen.”
Case in point: The agribusiness and energy councils of MACCI are spearheading an effort to power a cheese plant with an anaerobic digester on a USDA experimental dairy farm. The digester would process not only cow manure but also waste from the cheese plant itself to generate cheese-making electricity.
“That technology, while it’s not new, has not been adapted on the farms very readily,” Guse says. “Wisconsin has gained a foothold in that because of the large number of dairy farms that we have.”
Keeping agriculture ahead of the technology curve is important to this region that relies so heavily on the industry.
“Dairy is certainly the bread and butter of Central Wisconsin,” says Tom Drendel, superintendent of the University of Wisconsin – Marshfield/Wood County Agricultural Research Station.
In fact, just the four counties surrounding Marshfield would rank among the top 15 states for number of cows, edging out Vermont with more than 150,000 heads.
“So when you say how big of an impact dairy has in Central Wisconsin,” Drendel says, “it’s tremendous.”
Fortunately, the industry that made the region famous has an eye on the agricultural future – and the innovative technology to prove it.
