| Below:Chris Weaver is getting the most out of the manure at BridgewaterDairy. Above: Dried and recycled solids are used for bedding, whilemethane gas from manure is burned in on-farm generators to produceelectricity.
“Webelieve this is the way a dairy should be built because it’senvironmentally friendly, sustainable and palatable to neighbors.” –Chris Weaver
The Weavers' two generators, seen here in the final stages of construction, burn methane gas produced by manure.
| From Waste to Want
Northwest Ohio dairy is first in the state to produce electricity from manureBy Dan Toland | Photos by Erin Davis
The dairy is the second largest consumer in its electriccooperative, but thanks to the installation of the first anaerobicmethane digester on an Ohio dairy, Bridgewater is selling thecooperative 30 percent more electricity than it uses. The digester’s64-foot wide, 200-foot long and 16-foot deep chamber churns raw manureduring a three-week cycle where it converts organic material to biogasthat is burned in on-farm electricity generation.
It’s amulti-million dollar investment that has owners Leon Weaver and his sonChris bearing witness to agriculture’s potential to provide the worldwith a significant source of environmentally friendly energy, whileproviding a safe, abundant source of food.
“It almost makes milk a byproduct anymore,” Leon told a roundtable of Ohio dairy farmers last spring.
Asan added bonus, when all that manure goes through their entire system,the Weavers get a couple of extra products – an odorless, recycled,low-bacteria solid that is safe for bedding and a liquid that can beapplied to fields with little odor or compaction. “Now you don’t reallysee the manure going down the road,” Leon said, noting that just a fewyears ago, neighbors were complaining about slow tractors pullingspreaders full of the pungent material down the road.
“It’s notfun when you hear people complaining about things, true or not,especially when you try to work as hard as you can to keep things goodfor your environment and neighbors,” Chris said. “That (combined withrising energy costs) was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” hesaid about the family’s decision to look into alternative solutions.
Evenprior to discovering manure’s power-providing possibilities, Chris saidthey were always thinking about how to handle it. “For a part of theoperation that doesn’t make a whole lot of money, it’s the No. 1 areawe put our mind on,” he said.
In 2005, the Weavers visiteddairy-farming friends in Indiana who had installed a digester. Itpiqued their interest but wasn’t a cost effective investment at thetime. But with increasing energy costs and with government grants andcarbon credits becoming available, they started to think they couldbreak even on the investment.
“We thought (the decision to eventually install the digester) was a slam dunk for us,” Chris said.
TheWeavers figure it will take about eight years, with the assistance ofgreen and carbon credits, to realize a payback on the more than $2million that is invested in the new system, but social payback willcome much earlier.
“We believe this is the way a dairy should bebuilt because it’s environmentally friendly, sustainable and palatableto neighbors,” Chris said, noting that the steep investment is a stepin the right direction in making sure dairies continue to have asuccessful future in Ohio.
And just because the odor is out ofthe manure doesn’t mean the Weavers can slack off on theirresponsibilities. “If we spill a bit of manure on the road, we’ll takethe portable pressure washer out there and wash the road,” Chris said.“We probably spend a little extra money to make sure we keep thingsclean around here. It’s important to us and vital to our livelihoods.” 
METHANE — IT’S MORE THAN MANURE
Ohio Farm Bureau Director of Environmental Policy Larry Antosch said additional efforts are being made to harvest methane gas by capping liquid manure lagoons, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farms. Efforts to harness methane gas for energy aren’t limited to just livestock manure, though. The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio has a fleet of vehicles that runs on methane-based gas produced from the mounds of garbage in a Columbus-area landfill, and a waste water treatment plant in central Ohio is using the methane produced by sewage to power treatment processes. Outside of the United States, Antosch said families in China and India are producing biogas in their own homes, which serves a variety of uses, including cooking.
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