Growing Power redux

A few further thoughts on Growing Power.

My thoughts continue to revisit the genius behind the aquaponics growing system. It's so simple, but so powerful. What is the biggest problem with large scale farming and the environmental impact thereof? Fertilizers, and their runoff. Oil based fertilizers no less. Flip side: what is one of the biggest problems with commercial scale fish farming? Feces effluent and nitrogen blooms. How do you kill these two birds with one stone? Combine the feces bi product of the farmed fish with the nitrogen fertilizer needs of the rapidly growing vegetables, and voila, a closed zero pollution system. It's totally brilliant. And actually, I'm very impressed that it appears to be a fairly stable system, counter intuitive though it may be.

One thing that was briefly mentioned on our tour of Growing Power was their inactive anaerobic digester. Sadly, inactive. Although this is fairly understandable, as it takes diligence and skills to consistently run digester and not clog the bugger up with goat poo. I've been thinking about the importance and environmental effects of composting. Specifically, methane gas. All those animal, vegetable, and beer mash wastes sit in these big piles outside warming themselves with voracious bacterial activity, producing nice quality dirt and worms, and bi-producing carbon dioxide and methane gas. I'm not calling foul on this - if these product were thrown away and buried in a landfill somewhere in New Jersey, the decomposed mass would still off-gas all the same. But methane is a potent greenhouse gas, possessing 20 times more heat trapping power than the equivalent CO2 heat trapping power. That's significant (although methane breaks down atmospherically after only a dozen or so years, where CO2 lasts nearly forever). But methane is also highly flammable. So, why not capture it, burn it for energy, and just put out a bit more CO2?! That's where the digester comes in. It could definitely work and make more than enough energy to compensate for its own heating needs, and probably enough energy to heat some of the fish tanks as well. But, I guess it's hard to keep running. Bummer. The world needs more robust small scale anaerobic digesters, that's what everybody keeps saying.

More thoughts on leaf decomposition, tree life cycles, human heat production, and beer mash to come.