A dairy farm in the US is turning cow dung from its 3,400 cows into enough electricity to power 1,000 homes.
Homestead Dairy located in Plymouth, Indiana started creating electricity from dung in October 2013.
The farm put in a methane digester that creates the gas that runs the motors that run the generators, which is then sold to a local power company, the farm’s website states.
The conversion happens thanks to a biogas recovery system which was installed on the farm.
Floyd Houin, whose family has owned the farm in Plymouth, Indiana since 1945, speaking to phys.org, the physics website, said that one of the main reasons they did it was to try to help take care of the odour control for the neighbours.
“The land’s important to us also because we produce a crop for feeding cows. So we want to do everything we can to take care of the land and the water. We drink the same water as everyone else,” he said.
In the US farm-yard manure is typically stored in open lagoons which have a significant environmental impact because they emit methane and carbon dioxide.
The biogas recovery system takes removes both the smell and the greenhouse gases.
The Environmental Protection Agency in the US has estimated that more than 3m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions were eliminated last year by Homestead Dairy and the 246 other US livestock farms which have installed biogas recovery systems.
According to phys.org, that’s equivalent to taking more than 630,000 cars off the road.
Image: Homestead Dairy