Dairy Digesters 2

 In Copenhagen, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack recently announced an agreement between USDA and U.S. dairy farmers to look for ways to fund nutrient management components of a digester system with conservation funds and the electricity generation components with our renewable energy dollars.

 The Secretary promised to look for improvements such as adjusting the timing of program awards to better match construction seasons and reducing the time needed to get digester projects completed. Vilsack added that efforts in researching ways that greenhouse gas emissions associated with dairies can be reduced will be stepped up.

 So are anaerobic digesters the answer? Here’s Idaho Department of Energy’s John Crocket who spent 5 years trying to solve this problem and says it’s not as simple as just extracting methane: “ You end up with a gas that’s 60% methane, 40% carbon dioxide and we call that bio-gas, and then it has a few other things in it, but that can be very hard on engine generator sets. Those projects tend to get complicated. Back when I was working on it the failure rate was 60%.”That was then and this is now. Maybe digesters have gotten better but nothing’s ever a panacea.