Farms: Butler Farms on OFF LIMITS 2012
Productivity | Information | History | View | Quality
The Travel Channel, Off Limits visits Butler Farms, Lillington, NC USA. My brother Robert and I have been working toward this day for more than 5 years. We are contract growers for Prestage Farms, Clinton, NC. We have 10 Prestage 735 finishing barns and keep approximately 7500 heads of pigs at our farm for 20 week intervials. We are making electricity from swine waste methane bio-gas. We have 2 covered ambient lagoons digesters and 1 covered, synthetic lined, insulated and heated mesophillic digester. We have a bio-gas system in place and it is working and making electricity. The system has a lot of kinks at present to be worked out but we hope to keep improving the system we have and find better equipment and better technology through on farm research. We hope the efforts we have made will encourage other pork producers to get involved with renewable energy. Green, renewable energy is our future and it is the right thing to do. Recycling waste into energy is a win win situation. There were two or three errors made in the host's description of the operation. I would like to clear those unintentional errors up. Don stated that we could produce 180 kWH per day and that should have been 180 kWH per hour. Don also said that at the rate we produced electricity from swine waste we could operate 1 average refrigerator for more than a year. He should have said that we produce enough electricity from swine waste to operate 131 average 18 cubit feet refrigerators for a year when we get up to full production. Don stated that our green lagoon covers were 2 inches thick and he should have said 60 Mills thick.(approx. 1/8"). I thought Don Wildman, with Off Limits, did a extraordinary job with the remainder of the information. This video is the property of Authentic Entertainment and The Travel Channel, off Limits. This is a segment of the episode that was made at out farm. Our next challenge is to introduce off farm food waste into our system and hopefully triple our methane production at our farm. We do hope to soon produce enough electricity to supply 53 average homes in this area with renewable energy from swine waste. Doing so will have made all of this worthwhile.
Comments
-
helow, may I know the recipe you feed your beautiful pigs
-
Hi Mr. Butler, need to connect to you for similar project in India, how can we connect.
regards -
way to go on this new innovation Mr Butler. Your pigs look very healthy and delicious.
-
How do you heat the waste?
-
jdr
We do the best we can with animal comfort and spacing. The number of pigs in each pen has been determined by vets, animal scientist and others to be humane. I have been doing this for more than 20 years and for the most part the hogs/pigs appear to be comfortable. Our pig are happy, healthy, cool and misted with water in the summer, warm and dry in the winter inside modern buildings, our pigs have unlimited water and feed supply and weekly or as needed medical care. We love our pigs and we fully believe in proper animal treatment and welfare. Thank you for your comment. If you are ever in NC please come by the farm to see our pigs and you make your decision by observation. -
Good idea. But for goodness sakes why overcrowd the pigs??!? Smaller groups is better
-
I am glad about this, but why do they make livestock live in such crowded facilities like this? Why not let them out to roam around like they did on my grandpa's farm?
-
this needs to be made mandatory on all factory farms in the usa!
-
I appreciate your "play" on words, Andrew. Yes, we produce much more electricity with our swine waste than we use at the farm. We sell the excess electricity back to the grid and the co-op in turn distribute our renewable energy to our cooperative members to use in their homes. We also use solar panels to produce green energy to run the equipment that makes our renewable energy. Our digester and waste storage ponds are lined. The two larger storage ponds needs clean out in 7 years.(2020)
-
Not much different from the waste to energy at landfills out here on the west coast...great idea. Do you line the ponds with a liner? Do you have to clean the 2 other ponds out frequently? Does the energy produced "meat" the needs of your facility? haha
-
I love how he's wearing gloves for parts of this video yet there the animals consumers eat!
-
This is a ridiculous advertisement as at the end of the day there is NO NEED for us to eat animal at this day in age. Have you NOT noticed the amount of alternatives out there?! We DON'T NEED MEAT. I've been Vegan for ten years, I'm now 24 and weigh a healthy 9st 9. WAKE UP PEOPLE! All this space used for animals and the space needed to grow foods for these animals could be used for crops. All these chemicals fed to the animals goes straight in to you!
-
Are these the pigs that died in the floods in north carolina so sad the price of ham is going up can't u tell! u see all the pigs dead on the internet! so sorry they couldn't swim they were so full of ham!
-
Thanks Ricardo.
-
I was glad to be a part of the project Tom!
-
Good video.
-
This type of project can become a revenue stream for your farm. Let me know if you are interested and I can hook you up with the right people. Tom Butler butlerpigenergy@gmail.com
-
Come on Now! This is exciting stuff so please take a minute and tell me what you think of the possibilities of animal waste/food waste to electricity. Pros or Cons comments welcomed. It will really be helpful to hear what you think.l.