Manure entrepreneurs turn waste into energy

SEATTLE — The back end of a cow provides the front end of the green-energy business that Kevin Maas is slowly expanding in Western Washington and Oregon.

With missionary zeal, he and his brother Daryl build modest electricity-producing projects that help family-owned dairy farms preserve their key role in the agricultural ecosystem.

Their company, Farm Power, turns manure into electricity, fertilizer and bacteria-free animal bedding in Mount Vernon and Lynden. Another plant is slated to break ground this summer in Enumclaw, Wash., and two are planned in Tillamook, Ore.

The technology is fairly simple. What's hard about a manure digester is linking farmers, bankers, regulators, environmentalists and utilities.

"An urban liberal would get laughed off the farm" for trying to convince risk-averse dairymen they can save money while benefiting the environment, said the lanky, bearded 35-year-old. But with rural roots, as well as a master's degree in business administration, Maas seems uniquely suited to the task.

"Whether anyone else could have carried this off, I don't know," said Don Wick, executive director of the Skagit County Economic Development Association in Mount Vernon. "I had to admire their tenacity and boldness. They really believed in this."

Maas' fervent push for digesters grew from seeing family dairies slowly disappearing, despite their central place in the farm economy as sources of year-round jobs, natural local fertilizer and, of course, milk. His uncle in Minnesota recently gave up on dairy farming.

He has never milked a cow, though he raised a calf as a 4-H project. Still, growing up in Mount Vernon, both he and his younger brother worked summers for nearby farmers who grew everything from tulips and blueberries to spinach and hay. Their parents came from farm families, as did many friends at Mount Vernon Christian School.

"There were a lot more farms and a lot more cows" in Skagit County back then, Maas said. "At that point everybody milked 30, 40, 50 cows. ... Now you can't make a middle-class income with that."

Even dairies with several hundred cows are being squeezed by urban sprawl, environmental regulations and spiking feed costs. Adding electricity to the mix of farm products can help them survive, Maas said.

Yet Washington, with nearly 500 dairy farms, has only five digesters.

In the San Joaquin Valley, several dairy farms have built digesters in which bacteria break down manure, producing methane that can be burned to generate electricity. Those dairies include Fiscalini Cheese Co. near Modesto and the Joseph Farms cheese operation near Atwater.

Maas was teaching high school history in southwest Minnesota when he saw farmers setting up wind turbines on their land to generate electricity and supplement their income.

"It was really exciting to see these $2 million projects going in, and local guys owned them," Maas said.

Farm Power's initial project opened in August 2009.

Now a large red generator hums loudly inside a spartan metal building. Bright-yellow pipes feed in methane gas that rises off the digester's sealed outdoor pool of slurried cow manure.

Burning that potent greenhouse gas, Farm Power's Mount Vernon and Lynden generators produce enough electricity for about 1,000 homes. The methane kept out of the atmosphere equals the annual greenhouse-gas emissions of 3,000 cars.

The digesters also yield nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer and pathogen-free fiber — straw and such that survived the cows' digestive process — that the farmers use for bedding in their dairy barns. The two Mount Vernon farms save about $100,000 a year because they don't need to buy straw or sawdust for cow bedding, Maas said.

"It's just a big old circle. And when it's done right, that circle is very beneficial to us," said Jason Vander Kooy, the 35-year-old farmer whose dairy sits north of the Mount Vernon digester. "We're very happy with it."