Until recently, hogs roamed in outdoor pens or fields, where their droppings fertilized crops, but now hog-farming has gone big, and not everything scales well:
Most of the farms that survived did so by going big—raising thousands of animals that spend their entire lives inside barns. Today, Duplin County, North Carolina, the top swine producer in the country, is home to 530 hog operations with a collective capacity of 2.35 million animals. According to a 2008 GAO estimate, hogs in five eastern North Carolina counties produced 15.5 million tons of manure in one year.
To handle all that waste, farmers in North Carolina use a standard practice called the lagoon and spray field system. They flush feces and urine from barns into open-air pits called lagoons, which turn the color of Pepto-Bismol when pink-colored bacteria colonize the waste. To keep the lagoons from overflowing, farmers spray liquid manure on their fields nearby.
The result, says Steve Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is this: “The eastern part of North Carolina is covered with shit.”
They could collect the manure, tank it, ferment it, collect the methane, and then either sell or use the methane (to power homes, generators, vehicle engines etc). Although it might not be possible to then spread it on fields as fertizer.
Here’s a man who made a methane digester back in the 1970′s to power a small car:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/methane_bate.html
Or just google ‘methane digester’, ‘biogas’, or related terms.
Big dairy farms have a similar football-field-sized brown lake out back. Me, I’d try growing mushrooms on the poo.
“The eastern part of North Carolina is covered with shit”
The eastern part of North Carolina has always been covered with shit.