01/30/09 The Necessity of Renewable Energy

The Necessity of Renewable Energy. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Sometimes necessity is the driving factor for us. Take Zach Wirth's Rocking Z Guest Ranch in Wolf Creek, Montana. A number of years ago they moved away from their cow/calf operation and became a world class Guest Ranch that has over 55 horses. Business has been good but there was a major hurdle to jump. WIRTH: We are a long ways away from 3-phase electricity so we had no way on the ranch to irrigate our hay meadows with sprinklers. We were drying up our stream on our water right to irrigate our hay fields so in order to use water efficiently we had to transfer to a sprinkler irrigation system. In order to power that sprinkler irrigation system we had to go to a diesel driven irrigation pump. And of course we recently saw diesel prices reach all-time high prices. That forced the Rocking Z to apply for a grant from the NRCS and matched it with some of their own money. WIRTH: We burn straight vegetable oil to irrigate our hay meadows. We pump about 350 gallons per minute and we start the engine on diesel fuel, once the warm up cycle has go through which takes about 2 hours, then the engine automatically transfers to burning waste French fry oil from McDonalds. That saves them some 4 to 5000 gallons of diesel annually. But according to Wirth, that is not where the renewable link ends. WIRTH: We also make biodiesel. We then take another 14-1500 gallons of vegetable oil and process on the ranch and that's what runs our tractors and all of our haying and all of our farming is done on B100. 100% biodiesel and we burn that from March to late October. You might think that wind power would be next for the Rocking Z but the lack of electrical infrastructure limits that use. But there are some other things on the horizon for Wirth. WIRTH: The two things that would have a greater payback in our operation is a solar hot water heater for our showers and that type of thing. Geo-thermal or a ground heat source for our buildings. We have 11 buildings that we heat and cool on our guest ranch. That is something that we will probably have completed within the next year and a half. That should come out to saving us about $3 to $4-thousand dollars a year. Zach Wirth made a presentation on the Rocking Z renewables during the recent Harvesting Clean Energy Conference. You can read more about their efforts on their website at rockingz.com. The next Harvesting Clean Energy Conference will be in Washington in 2010. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org