Michigan For A Day - Wed 20 March

One of the things that is becoming apparent on my travels in the Northern Mid West is how willing people are to help and share there business and skills with you. A phone call to Green Meadows Dairy Farm in Elsie MI, and we were welcomed to their business which is milking 3700 cows.



 They are a third generation family business and we met first with Valmer Green, the second generation farmer, then with Don Rogers, who is best described as Operations Manager and was to be our tour guide. Don is a Vietman Vet, trained electrican and able to turn his hand to anything including dabbling in wheat futures !

Valmer Green, Don Rogers and Steve Wilkins

First stop was the parlour which is milking 3700 cows 3 times a day, through a double 30 and a double 20 herringbone parlour.They are running two 12 hour shifts 24 hours a day. Fifty staff are involved in the milking with 87 staff in total.
 Cows are producing 90lbs milk (not solids) per day on average. My math says thats aound 4.5 kgms!
 Milk is cooled and pumped directly into waiting semi trailers for delivery to the processing plant some 100 km away.

Around 600 cows calve per month. Water use is around 1 million litres a day cows are bedded on a mixture of sand and gypsin.
 Effluent from the barns is put through a separator to take the sand out, which is then reused. The effluent is then heated to 35C and put into a biodigestor where it spends 21 days.
 The gas produced fuels a 1400hp Cat engine which is coupled to a genset, putting electricity into the grid at a value of 8 cents/kw. The heat from the engine also warms the effluent going into the digestor. Currently the effluent going into the digester is 2.75 % solids.The ideal is 5%, which means it's very inefficient.
 Ideally something would be added to 'feed' the digester, corn, suger beet corn oil from an ethanol plant, but these have become too expensive to be viable.

Michigan State Govt. Put $2.5m into the set up of the Bio Digester and were to have an ongoing research and support relationship with Green Meadows, however the funding was cut and there is a classroom and resources on site that have not been used.

The digester produces 70000 ton of carbon credits per year, some of which are sold to Disney World in Florida. Once out of the digester, the effluent is put through a press to remove excess water and potassium, before being turned into compost. The water by that stage is ready to be reused in the washdown areas of pumped to ponds for spreading onto the Corn and Alfalfa.

Compost after having the water extracted

The land consists of 7000ac with 3200ac of Alfafa, 3200ac Corn and 500ac and 7 pivot irrigators. Currently they are trialing a screw system to dry the effluent to a stage where it can be used as part of the bedding mix or spread onto crop land. The model is working but the through put is not high enough as yet. It would seem questionable to as to whether the model is currently economic, given that a huge part of the investment was covered by State Govt. None the less Green Meadows Farm are to be congratulated on their forward thinking.
 Thanks to Don Rogers for his time showing us a very sustainable and self sufficient Dairy unit.


So after 24 hours in Michigan its time to say goodbye at least until the summer when I will poke around some more.
We will head south to Indiana, where our next appointment is tomorrow afternoon.