Community digester operations and dairy farmer perspectives

Abstract

Rising energy costs, increasing herd sizes, and other structural changes affecting the New York dairy industry may make farmers receptive to new energy production technologies. Anaerobic digestion represents a possible benefit to farmers by reducing odor while producing methane for electricity. However, current digester designs are for herd sizes of 300 or more cows, with significant economies of scale, so smaller operators may have little interest in the technology. Moreover, without a favorable policy environment and reliable grant programs, the initial investments required for digester installation might deter operators. One solution to these issues may be community digesters, which are centrally located facilities that accept manure from multiple farms. Data from a survey of New York dairy farmers were used to assess farmers’ interest in community digesters. In general, interest was associated with power generation outcomes and reservations about organic farming practices; advocates might encourage their use among smaller conventional farm operators looking for new sources of profit and diversification.

Appendix

Interview 1

Respondent 1: “One of the things I’ve often said to people, but it’s hard to get people to think outside that box, and everyone tells me it will never work and it’s crazy, but I still think in an area like this, I don’t give the small farmer the death knell yet. They may have to change how they do some things, but I still think a community digester in a small area like this has a tremendous potential. But you can’t get people to—I don’t know how to put those pieces together.”

Respondent 2: “If they’re not going to see a definite money advantage, a lot of these small farmers—”

Respondent 1: “Well we had a guy down here, a small family farm, milked 40 cows. He was getting closer to retiring, and his children were not interested in taking over the farm, it was trapped with all the property around it because everything’s residential, and so he approached Bob and said, Geez, maybe I ought to think about buying my crops from you, because I can’t afford a full-time employee, I don’t want to work 7 days a week, 365 days a year all the time, and I’m not going to be able to sell and retire, and so we cropped his land, and he paid us so much a ton based on quality, and he went to milking his cows three times a day by himself because he had enough time to do it, and he said I’ve never made more milk in my life, and he said I’ve still got time on my hands. And so he was one of the guys who, this is a good deal, and to me that’s where some of these small farmers—you can’t afford with 45 cows to go put up the money for equipment that it’s going to take, so a guy like that did quite well with this arrangement.”

Interview 2

Respondent 3: “And maybe I’m just a negative person but if I’m going to put 8 loads in I’m going to be sure I get 8 loads out at the back—and maybe my load isn’t as much as your load, and who’s going to keep track of all those statistics. My guess is that someone coming from a tie-stall is going to have possibly a lot more sawdust, more straw, and again, how do you get it into the system, and there might be different consistencies of manure, my system it has to be very liquid…”.

Interview 3

Respondent 4: “We looked into that, bringing manure into a central location, but there just wasn’t the commitment to do that, and we didn’t have the place to utilize the electricity in a central location. So, the concept was good, but transporting manure and transporting it back—at the time there was kind of more of a fear of…our manure coming in and someone else’s going back, which would have some possibly different bacteria or whatever. It just didn’t seem to fit.

Interviewer: Do you think there are any obstacles that would be removed to make that—or is that kind of just the way it is—it’s harder to get a community digester up and running?

Respondent 4: It just depends on the area; size of farms and the age of the managers and whether they want to work together, whether they want to spend the money. The digesters that we’ve got, in order for them to continue, they have to be cost-effective to where people will go out and make the decision to buy one and then buy it—not rely on grant money every time you have to do that. Because you know what it is writing grants probably—it’s frustrating. Takes a long time. Most people want to make a decision and then go ahead and do it, not well, if we get the funding then we’ll go ahead and do it.”