A bio-digester currently under construction at Thurler Farms, one of 310 planned facilities across Canada to take manure from 80% of the country’s dairy farms for processing into renewable natural gas.
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
CANADA — Canada’s dairy farmers are planning to transform much of their cow manure into green energy as a key part of the industry’s pledge to be ‘net zero’ by 2050.
The elaborate plan involves the construction of 310 new on-farm biogas facilities across Canada to process 80% of the nation’s dairy cow manure by 2030, according to a video screened at the Dairy Farmers of Canada’s annual general meeting in July. Not every farm will get a bio-digester. Many farms will participate by having their manure trucked to one of the methane-capturing facilities, and then trucked back to the farm as “digestate” after undergoing the anaerobic process.
Manure will be picked up “every few days,” according to the video, so add the manure truck to the milk truck making regular visits up the farm laneway
The collected methane will be sold into the natural gas grid, displacing fossil-fuel natural gas, with profits shared by the involved farmers. A company has been set up — GET Corp — to oversee what’s been dubbed the Sustainable Agriculture Program (SAP). The effort is supposed to cut 1.5 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from the sector, including 500,000 tonnes in Ontario.
The first of the planned bio-digesters is currently under construction at the South Dundas farm of Dairy Farmers of Ontario board member Nick Thurler, president and founder of GET Corp. An initial pilot group of six such facilities will be built in Ontario through a $56.5 million investment partnership with GFL Environmental.
See the video below.
