Is Turning Chicken Poop Into Fuel a Good Idea?

[Jilly_in_VA]

When Wayne Morra bought six acres of land hedged by rolling cornfields in 1999, he was looking for some peace. A single father and a nursing instructor at Delaware Technical Community College, Morra considered his new home, in the tiny town of Greenwood, Delaware, a refuge from the bustle and pollution of Pittsburgh, his hometown.

But in 2015, when the farmland directly behind his property went up for sale, Morra’s idyll came to an end.

A farmer built three long green barns just 500 feet from Morra’s house, which he now packs with approximately 90,000 chickens at a time. When the birds reach market weight, their owner, the poultry giant Amick Farms, collects them for slaughter.

But there are always premature deaths. The farmer tosses those carcasses in outdoor piles, which attract foxes and buzzards. And he pumps his barns’ ammonia-tainted exhaust, through massive ventilation fans, into the surrounding neighborhood. Many days, Morra can’t walk from his house to his car without being swarmed by flies. He runs, gagging from the stench of rotting birds.

Eleven other chicken houses of similar design lay within walking distance of these barns. “We’re surrounded,” Morra noted.

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/12/biogas-anaerobic-digesters-chicken-waste/
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I don't think this answers the question, but I'd like to know too. I live in the largest turkey-producing region of VA. Turkey poop is essentially the same thing,

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. I would think it IS at least in theory, but don't know all the details of the process

However, the facilities need to be located in areas where they're not a nuisance to neighbors, which seems problematic.

I mean, I suppose OPTIMALLY everyone's a vegetarian and no poultry is even raised anymore, but that's not likely anytime soon.

In the meantime, if you can turn poop and discarded carcasses and such into fuel instead of waste, why wouldn't you?

Sounds like you even still get non-fossil-fuel based fertilizer out of the process, so you don't lose that piece, at least not entirely.

Everything is a compromise.

[rsdsharp]

2. I think it beats the hell out of turning it into

chicken salad.

[Bev54]

3. I did a lot of research on anaerobic digesters for Dairy farms and I think it is

much easier for them than chickens for a few reasons. One is the manure needs to be slurry, but while the manure is really good, it itself does not produce a lot of energy, it is mixing it with other wastes that makes it produce. The dairy I was working with was within distance of chicken farms and a processing plant, which waste would work well but we needed a lot of waste such as the mash from a brewery about 20 miles away. We were also working with the regional district at the time to get household digestible waste delivered as well. It does depend where you live, this was in BC Canada and unfortunately we determined that the available digesters on the market (the best we found was from Denmark) could not handle our cold weather and had a high likely hood of freezing up. The electric company as well as the gas company were both interested in the energy that would be produced and had determined from the 900 milking head dairy, it would have serviced power for 300-350 homes in the area. So it depends on your location and if you are close to dairy farms, whose manure is already slurry, then it would make sense for them to take the chicken waste. It would not make sense if you have to transport manure, it is not cost effective.