The Rural Voice, 1979-08, Page 5working drawings for the unit and then submitting the plan for
tender and getting it built.
MID -1980
Prof. Pos' pro ject is working along parallel lines with the
design of new swine facilities at the Arkel Research Station near
the University campus. The construction phase of the methane
production plant comes next, and Prof. Pos hopes the plant can
be in operation sometime in mid -1980.
In the meantime, he does have a pilot digester already
,,roducing methane gas, but at present, until the plant goes into
operation the gas is simply let off into the atmosphere.
Production of an on-farm digester doesn't come cheap. The
staff at the School of Engineering estimate it would cost a farmer
$30,000 to construct a methane production and storage unit to
treat the manure from 500 feeder pigs. This results in an annual
operating cost of $5,000 plus an estimated labor cost of $2,200 for
a total annual operating cost of 51,200 or about $20 per day.
The only other two on-farm digester projects Prof. Pos knows
about are being carried on at the Biomass Institute in Winnipeg
and at the John and Eric farm in eastern Ontario. A
Waterford -area hog farmer has applied for a Farmer Incentive
Program grant to experiment with a digester on his farm, but the
grant application hasn't yet been approved.
Prof. Pos said he has received numerous letters and inquiries
about the feasibility of building digester systems since he started
his research on methane production.
He said the farmer who is most likely to contact him is
Jack Pos stands beside the heavy rubber bag which le used to collect the methane
gas from the digester system being tested at the Arkel Research Station. At
present, the gas Is being let out Into the atmosphere, until the complete
experimental methane plant Is built.
someone being "pushed up against the wall to do something
about manure management on his farm." For example, farmers
in proximity to urban areas may be faced with neighbours
complaining about odours. Or, the ministry of environment may
be putting pressure on the farmer to clean up a runoff or
contamination problem from manure.
Prof. Pos cautions with the pitfalls of methane -production, if
the farmer faces an odour problem, there are aeration devices of
different sorts which can be used to solve this worry - for a cost of
about $5,000. Although ideally an efficient digester system
should remove odours from the manure sludge which emerges as
effluent, in actual fact, if all the bugs aren't ironed out, odour
control can still be a problem.
PITFALLS
Other' pitfalls facing the farmer installing a digester system
include temperature control. Methane -producing bacteria need a
temperature of 35 ° C to produce gas efficiently and that
temperature can't be allowed to fluctuate. Donald Presant
reports that "research work in Canada, although not complete,
indicates that a minimum of 30 per cent of yearly gas production
and as much as 50 per cent or more of winter gas production
wou id be required to keep the mixture in the methane digester
at this temperature."
The engineer goes on to point out that during the winter, when
Ontario residents would need gas to heat either their homes or
their livestock barns, 50 per cent of the gas may be used up just
keeping the manure mixture warm.
THE RURAL VOICE/AUGUST 1979 PG. 3