Wednesday, June 19, 2013
I am a contract pork producer for Prestage Farms in Eastern NC. We have been in operation for 16 years and we strive to be good environmental stewards. We keep 7500 to 8000 hogs on our farm. We collect the swine waste in our two covered lagoons (ambient digesters) and sequester CO2 and CH4 under the covers. For the past 3 years we have flared off the methane and carbon dioxide and collected carbon credits. We have recently constructed a new anaerobic/mesophillic digester(1,000,000 gallons) at our farm to better process our waste and to try and glean more methane from our waste. We have also added a 20,000 gallon mix tank and hope to get permitted to bring in off farm food waste to mix with our manure to enhance methane production even more. We are currently using our methane bio-gas to fuel an internal spark 180 KW gen-set and we have produced more than 60,000 kWh of electricity since April 01, 2012. We are not up to full power yet. We are still making adjustment to our system and when we reach full capacity we should be able to produce 725,000 to 825,000 kWh per year. This will mean that our little farm will be putting enough renewable/green energy back into the grid of our local cooperative (South River Electric Membership Cooperative, Dunn, NC) to furnish electricity for 55 homes. We hope to add solar to our system soon and also figure a way to make pelletized fertlizer from our swine waste sludge. We are proud of our system and hope this will be a prototype that the Pork industry can improve on and use in the future. Currently our swine industry in NC produces approximately 13.5 billion scf of bio-gas methane and I am hopeful we will soon put it to use as an asset instead of a waste product being released into the atmosphere as a green house gas. The resource is already on your farm ......why not use it???
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