How do farm methane projects work?
We help build manure digesters on family dairy farms that store their manure in storage ponds, where it is kept before being spread two or three times a year on the fields. In these storage ponds, all but the very surface of the manure has no access to oxygen, so bacteria that thrive without oxygen decompose the manure, giving off gases including methane as a byproduct, which bubble up and enter the atmosphere. There, methane has 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide. Each 95 pounds of methane can be expressed as one ton of CO2-equivalent, or CO2e. The farms we work with install anaerobic digester systems in place of the storage ponds. These digesters are heated, airtight systems that accelerate the decomposition and capture the methane, which the farms then burn, typically in diesel generators, to produce electricity and useful heat. The digested manure is then pumped from the digester to pre-spread storage lagoons, with virtually no future methane off-gassing. As the C
We help build manure digesters on family dairy farms that store their manure in storage ponds, where it is kept before being spread two or three times a year on the fields. In these storage ponds, all but the very surface of the manure has no access to oxygen, so bacteria that thrive without oxygen decompose the manure, giving off gases including methane as a byproduct, which bubble up and enter the atmosphere. There, methane has 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide. Each 95� pounds of methane can be expressed as one ton of CO2-equivalent, or CO2e. The farms we work with install anaerobic digester systems in place of the storage ponds. These digesters are heated, airtight systems that accelerate the decomposition and capture the methane, which the farms then burn, typically in diesel generators, to produce electricity and useful heat. The digested manure is then pumped from the digester to pre-spread storage lagoons, with virtually no future methane off-gassing. As th
