Name: Monument Farms' Biodigester
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Reporter Abagael Giles explored innovative local solutions to climate change through biodigesters. Methane is a super potent greenhouse gas and is abundant on farms with large amounts of livestock.  Some farmers are capturing that biogas and burning it in a generator. A story part of NOVA's #climateacrossamerica.

Innovative local solutions to climate change through biodigesters.

Monument Farms' Biodigester

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Biodigesters ARE still putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. At some farms in Vermont, gas produced by the digester is refined on site.

Biodigesters ARE still putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. At some farms in Vermont, gas produced by the digester is refined on site. At that point, it’s almost PURE methane and can be injected into a natural gas pipeline. Some environmental groups say there’s a risk to the climate if farms decide to get bigger just to send more methane to gas pipelines instead of letting their cow poop sit, if they didn’t have a biodigester.This video was produced in collaboration with NOVA and is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

Biodigesters ARE still putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. At some farms in Vermont, gas produced by the digester is refined on site. At that point, it’s almost PURE methane and can be injected into a natural gas pipeline.

Biodigesters ARE still putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. At some farms in Vermont, gas produced by the digester is refined on site. At that point, it’s almost PURE methane and can be injected into a natural gas pipeline.

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Narration: When people think of Vermont, a lot of the time they think, dairy cows. But what you might not know is that cows contribute to climate change when they burp and poop.Joe Rudek: Agriculture in general is responsible for about 15% of the global greenhouse gas impacts.Narration: A major culprit, methane, which is a super potent climate warming greenhouse gas. In the short term, methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. That's because of how it traps radiation. It's better at holding heat in the atmosphere. And one major source of it is when cow manure breaks down. It might not sound like much, but it adds up.Monument Farms in Weybridge, Vermont, is a small dairy farm that's trying to do something about it.Bob James: At this facility, we have around 540 cows right now. A cow can eat 60 pounds of feed a day and drink 40 to 60 gallons of water a day. That turns into 33 gallons of waste per milking cow per day.Narration: Multiply that by 540 cows and the animals on this farm are producing more than 15,000 gallons of manure every day.Bob James: Basically, what's in it is particles of the feed that never broke down in the cow’s stomach.Narration: Traditionally, farmers let that manure break down in an open-air lagoon before spreading it on their fields as fertilizer. But in the process, methane is released into the atmosphere is a biproduct.Joe Rudek: If that process is enclosed, that methane is captured.Narration: And that's being done on some farms like monument by something called a biodigester.Bob James: The manure gets pushed and there's a grated floor at the end that will drop down into a trench. That's the flow gutter. So, everything flows down to the very end to the pump station that will feed the digester. It's in there 21 days. The digester is basically the same thing as a cow stomach. It's a living thing in there.Narration: Just like in the manure pit, bacteria eat the undigested particles of food. All that eating makes a methane rich gas called biogas that gets trapped at the top of the digester. As for what's left over...Bob James: As more comes in, it just keeps getting pushed across, comes out the other end. It then gets pumped up to the separator where we squeeze it with an auger through heavy screens, liquid will go out to the manure pit for us to then spread on the field for fertilizer, the solid matter we utilize for the bedding under the cows.Joe Rudek: In addition, methane is essentially natural gas, and so, it can be used as a fuel.Narration: At Monument Farms, the gas gets pumped into an engine, where it’s burned to make electricity, which gets sent into the grid and monument farms gets a credit on their electric bill.Bob James: The generator here can put out around $15,000 a month of credit and that's roughly what our bill is for our whole entire business.Narration: Now, to be clear, burning methane still creates greenhouse gas emissions. It turns the methane into carbon dioxide and water. But CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in the near term. So, if done well, this is a better alternative to directly releasing methane into the atmosphere.Joe Rudek: Given the potential that we currently have for reducing methane from oil and gas and from livestock, we could avoid a quarter of a degree Celsius of warming by mid-century, which is very significant.

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Monument Farms' Biodigester

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Support Provided By

Explore More

Can We Cool the Planet?

Chasing Carbon Zero

Weathering the Future