Renewable Energy

Anerobic digesters capture the methane produced by food waste and animal manure as it decomposes. This destructive greenhouse gas gets filtered and converted into cooking fuel and electricity and the remaining gas that would be released is CO2, which is much less harmful to the atmosphere, but we take it a step further and vent it into our greenhouse to be used by the plants so that very little will make it into the atmosphere. Once the digested waste has made its way through the digester, it comes out as a nutrient rich slurry. We feed the slurry into our composter to further decompose. Heat is another byproduct which gets captured in our geothermal system and used to heat the both the biodigester and the compost for faster processing. Since the majority of our vegetables are produced in our aquaponics system which produces crops faster and in less space, we end up with more plant waste and crop residue than our small herd of animals can eat and some crop residues can be deadly to certain animals so these types of items would get grinded and fed directly into the composter.

Other countries have been using simple versions of anerobic digesters for hundreds of years but they are relatively unknown in the USA due to cost versus output for large scale use. It takes people who want to reduce their carbon footprint and become energy independent to invest in this type of system.