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About 15 years ago, Mark Crave began using a digester. The complex machine is housed in what looks like a small silo from the outside; inside, microorganisms break down the massive amount of cow manure produced on his Crave Brothers Dairy near Waterloo.
It produces methane that’s burned to provide enough electricity to power the Crave Brothers farm, cheese factory and a number of homes in the community. Plus, it prevents the gases from the manure from entering the atmosphere and the manure itself from polluting streams.
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But the digester comes with a price tag that’s prohibitive for many farmers: The project cost about $1.2 million and requires six-figure operating expenses (partially offset by energy savings). “It’s a huge capital cost,” Crave says, but it’s worth it for his business – for the environmental impact and help it lends in marketing his products. “Other farmers down the road may not have that opportunity.”
Sustainability has become a buzzy catch-all for environmental issues and anti-climate change efforts – and it’s a hot button in dairy farming in recent years.
From the methane produced by cows (cow farts, to put it in layman’s terms), to manure runoff, soil erosion and more, dairy farmers have been called on to make their operations more environmentally friendly.
The relatively easy and affordable practices Wisconsin farmers are increasingly turning to include winter cover crops, which improve soil health and reduce erosion, and low-disturbance manure application, in which liquid manure is injected at the root of the plants, where its nutrients are most needed, without soil-damaging tilling.
Lauren Brey, who co-owns a dairy farm outside Sturgeon Bay with her husband and his family, leads Farmers for Sustainable Food, a national nonprofit that aims to make sustainable solutions more attainable for those “farmers down the road” that Crave talks about.
“Sustainability has to be environmental, but it also has to be financial and social,” Brey says. “That’s what we’re focused on, and we’re seeing that you can have an environmentally sound practice that will also be financially sustainable.”
Over the past four years, Farmers for Sustainable Food has analyzed data from farms that implement sustainable practices to measure their impact.
Brey points to several key findings: Farms that implemented sustainable practices had healthier soil, less soil erosion, increased crop yield and a more profitable net yield than those that didn’t.
“That’s really exciting – to have that real data to prove that conservation practices make business sense,” she says.
