Ponds of Poo Used for Clean Power in Australian Pork and Beef Production

Dec 01, 2021

Ranchers in Australia are gradually allowing the “back end” of their animals to take care of their own back end when it comes to electricity costs by converting pig and cow excrement into fuel for biogas power plants.

“Piggeries” as they’re called in Australia, don’t have a reputation for clean or for green, but are now greener than vegetables as far as climate change is concerned, after concerted effort and investment from industry organizations and individual ranchers have turned pork into the second-lowest GHG producing agricultural source in the country.

Jock Charles operates Berrybank Piggery, and it was 27 years ago he started investing into waste-to-energy systems on his property where he rears 20,000 pigs at any given time. Traditionally, waste from pigs is collected and dumped into “effluent ponds,” where it’s treated with anaerobic bacteria to break it down.

Now Charles, who built a bio-digester, simply pumps it into a machine that operates in parallel to a pig’s stomach. There, bacteria breaks waste down into harmless manure, producing methane in the process. This methane is converted by a turbine into heat, which generates 90% of Berrybank’s electricity needs.

“We are producing about the same as we use, but during the day when we’re running the feed mill and a few other things, we are pulling some power in from the grid, and then in the evening, we export power,” Charles told ABC Australia.

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Video: We Let Dad Drive a 50,000 Pound Dump Truck

There's old hog barns under that field now. The old hog barn site on the farm has been sitting there for decades, and this is the week it finally came out: concrete pad, burn pile, charred lumber, all of it loaded into a CAT 725C rock truck and buried in a pit we dug back in the timber.

Tork's been waiting his whole life to drive one of these, so he gets the keys to a 50,000 pound rock truck and I ride shotgun. The excavator loads, the dozer clears the timber, the drone shows the whole site from above, and by sundown there's nothing left of the old place but a smooth patch of dirt. It's a weird feeling erasing something that was here before either of us, but the farm has to keep moving.