The Chicken Poop Solution

Fifty miles outside of Beijing, a farm with more than three million chickens is collecting its daily torrent of guano, harvesting the methane, and using it to generate 14,600 megawatt hours of electricity a year, enough for more than 10,000 homes. That might not stave off the electricity shortages in Beijing’s suburbs, but it will help.

The manure scheme is good news for everyone. In the past, the methane went into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. The fecal matter seeped into the groundwater, potentially causing illness. Using the biogas from the manure instead of dirtier coal-fired power is expected to cut the equivalent of 95,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Appears like it’s a great solution to our impending energy crisis. However, I can’t help but agree with this commentor:

“good for green energy concerns, but the conditions those chickens live under are abhorrent by even today’s low standards.” – Posted by Branker on July 22, 2009 03:02 ET

A looming question I have is, what are the true effects on our planet of excrement produced by large-scale factory farms?

Upon a little research, I came upon this article on GoVeg.com: environment-pollution

Animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. population, roughly 89,000 pounds per second, all without the benefit of waste treatment systems.

The use of excrement as energy does do some good to help alleviate the other problems it causes, such as water contamination and air pollution. But in a perfect world, we would be relieved of these problems to begin with by completely reducing the existence of factory farms and relying on small scale local farmers. If most small farmers are anything like us at Sweet Local, 100% of that excrement is going back into the soil to help produce healthy crops.

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