The modern face of farming in this region is changing. In the first of a multi-part series, this paper looks at the evolution underway in agriculture and how it’s changing our rural and urban communities. On Saturday: Urban farmers.
When the federal government wanted to launch a clean-technology program this year, it used an Ottawa Valley farm to showcase how bioproducts could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainability.
The site of the launch was Terryland Farms Inc., a 1,000-acre dairy farm east of Ottawa in St-Eugène, the last community along Highway 417 at the Quebec border.
And for good reason.
Eleven years ago, Terryland became the first Ontario farm to sell electricity converted from cow manure to the grid, and has since expanded to generating more power — and additional income — from solar panels.
It’s been just one of the ways modern farmers, including those in the Ottawa Valley, have gone green.
George Heinzle, 56, who runs Terryland with his 52-year-old wife, Linda, and their 31-year-old son, Terry (for whom the farm is named), knew about the potential of animal dung. His native Austria introduced biodigesters to produce energy from excrement back in the 1970s.
In 2006, Heinzle built his own biodigester, in which manure from his 300 head of cattle, along with liquid waste he receives from food-processing plants in the Montreal area, are placed into a 1,000-cubic metre, oxygen-free tank fitted with heating coils that keep the temperature inside at 40 C.
“It’s sort of like a big cow stomach,” explains Heinzle, who immigrated to Canada 36 years ago and bought the land for his farm a year later.
“The food that cows eat is not completely digested, so we break the manure down further with bacteria to create methane gas, or biogas, that we collect and run through generators to produce electricity.”
Fat and oil drawn from the sludge and mixed with the manure creates more gas, and, as a result, more energy — enough to provide electricity to as many as 300 homes.
(It takes about 30 days to convert that gunk into biogas, which, as Heinzle points out, also eliminates most of the associated odours and doesn’t smell nearly as bad as the raw manure farmers spread on their fields.)
For Terryland Farms, the power-producing biodigester has resulted in an additional source of revenue beyond dairy products. The Heinzles sell the electricity generated to Hydro One at a rate of 20 cents per kilowatt hour, which adds up to an average of $20,000 per month. Solar panels on three of Terryland’s five barns send electricity to the grid and provide further income at a rate of 70 cents/kWh. (That return depends on sunlight and varies from as high as $12,000 to $13,000 a month in June, to as low as $1,200 to $1,500 in December.)
Heat generated from the two engines that drive the biodigester is used to heat the family home, provide hot water and dry corn in the fall. Heinzle, who has passed Terryland’s management to Terry so that he can devote his full attention to the biodigester operation, will also buy back from Hydro One electricity generated for use on the farm.
However, by producing their own power, the Heinzles end up saving money on utility costs — and on fertilizers, since the biodigester also produces digestate, which provides soil with organic content and moisture retention.
Terryland is so sustainable that cows sleep on pasture mats that, in a sense, they made. Undigested fibres processed by the biodigester are used for their bedding.
Liberal MP Francis Drouin, whose Glengarry-Prescott-Russell riding includes Terryland and more than 300 other, mainly dairy farms, has seen agricultural producers going green in different ways.
He says that some, such as the Heinzles, are using biodigesters and solar panels on their farms. Others are using dairy robots to milk their cows and allow farmers to focus more on making their operations more sustainable.
Drouin has also seen more “precision farming” in the Ottawa Valley.
Rather than fertilizing all fields, farmers are relying on soil testing which, through satellite GPS technology, connected to their tractors allows them to pinpoint what rows or areas require top dressing.
“That creates a better yield and allows them to save money, which going green also allows them to do,” Drouin says.
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