Last Thursday I went with the Eau Claire Chamber of Commerce Leadership group on an Ag Day excursion. It was surprisingly interesting in a number of ways. We started the day with a talk from the local extension agent about ways to live in a more sustainable manner. He mentioned rain barrels. I really miss the rain barrel I had in Davenport. Here they have classes on how to make them but I just want to get one already to go. Davenport had a program that sold them really cheap. They cost over $100 on the internet.
Our next stop was a huge dairy farm outside of town, Five Star Diary. The farm is a family run operation that milks more that 600 cows daily with another 800 moving in and out of the milking cycles. As you might imagine with so many cows there is a lot of manure created on that farm. What they do with that manure is what makes this farm really unique. They have a huge methane digester operation that takes the manure and through a chemical process extracts the methane, cleans it up and uses it to power a massive generator that puts electricity into the power grid. They estimate that the methane produces enough electricity to power over 600 households. The material that comes out of the digester process doesn't even smell. I know, I walked right by it. They use this stuff for bedding for the cows. The cows need a lot of bedding. It looks like they never move out into pastures and spend their lives in these huge feeding barns. The barns seemed hospitible but are still indoor feedlots. Everything was computerized and very high-tech.
In the afternoon we toured the opposite side of the spectrum. There are a lot of Amish farms around Eau Claire so we were able to tour one of those operations. It was such a contrast from the farm in the morning. Here they milked 14 cows with another 30 in the cycle. The milking barn on the Amish farm had fourteen milking stalls and each had the name of the cow that got milked there. Each stall was customized for an individual cow.The cows weren't in the barn while we were there, though. They were out in the field. It was like seeing how a Midwest dairy farm operated in the early 1900s. As we were leaving the farmers wife and two daughters came out and gave us homemade donuts. There were tons of donuts! They were made without any electicity. I don't have any pictures because the Amish do not want any pictures taken of them.
