Livestock Benchmarking

New Methane Digester Complete at Tri-Cross Dairy, Begins Supplying RNG

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 19:15:26 GMT

Renewable natural gas (RNG) is certainly making a big appearance in 2024. Tri-Cross Dairy, a 5,000-cow operation located in Viborg, S.D., is the second dairy in the state within the last two months to begin supplying RNG to the natural gas pipeline via a methane digester.

According to Clean Energy, Tri-Cross Dairy’s partner for the project, the new facility is forecasted to produce 1 million gallons annually of negative carbon-intensity RNG.

The construction costs of the RNG production facility, which includes the build of digesters and processing plant, totaled $34 million and was completed in December 2023. The injecting of pipeline-quality RNG began shortly after completion. Clean Energy is in the process of filing the necessary applications to generate federal and state environmental credits. The facility is one in a series of projects in the Midwest for which the companies have partnered together.

“We anticipate 2024 to be a pivotal year in the demand for RNG fuel in the transportation market with the introduction of Cummins’ X15N natural gas engine for heavy-duty trucks. Clean Energy’s fueling infrastructure is expanding to meet that demand and we’ll need a constant source of additional low-carbon RNG to supply those stations. The new production facilities at Tri-Cross Dairy and the other farms in the Midwest that are now producing RNG is a critical component to our strategy,” said Clay Corbus, senior vice president for renewables.

Earlier this year, Drumgoon Dairy, a 6,500-cow operation in Lake Norden, S.D., also began producing RNG through its methane digester project. The facility has since begun injecting ultra-low carbon RNG into the interstate natural gas pipeline system. According to a Clean Energy press release, Drumgoon Dairy is expected to supply 1.66 million gallons of negative carbon-intensity RNG annually to the transportation market when at full capacity.

How It’s Made

While dairy cows are known for their ability to make milk, they’re also scrutinized for their ability to produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture accounts for nearly 10% of U.S. GHG emissions. However, the dairy industry plays a big role in being part of a global climate solution.

“Renewable natural gas is chemically the same as the natural gas you might get in your stove, but what makes it renewable is that it is sourced from landfills or dairy farms,” says Will Flanagan, vice president of strategic development at Clean Energy. “What we’re doing is gathering manure and putting it in a digester, which captures the raw methane, or biogas, that would otherwise be going into the atmosphere. Then we pipe that raw biogas to an on-site gas processing plant where we clean it up by taking out the unwanted constituents.”

Once the methane has been converted into RNG, it is injected into a local natural gas pipeline and distributed to one of Clean Energy’s 540 fueling stations.

For more on sustainability, read:

Chip-less, Battery-free Sensing Technology Could be Next Phase of Animal Monitoring

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 21:36:27 GMT

A team of Irish researchers has developed a breakthrough innovation to monitor activity and health characteristics of dairy cows – and it doesn’t involve any wires, chips, batteries, or electronics of any kind.

The system is the brainchild of researchers at the VistaMilk SFI Research Centre in County Cork, Ireland. VistaMilk is a research conglomerate of six Irish agricultural research institutions, with the overarching mission of “digitizing dairy.”

On The VistaMilk Podcast , lead researcher Nadeem Rather described the system, which he and his team developed based on antenna technology. “Antennas are the key instruments that allow us to transmit and receive magical radio waves,” shared Rather.

The researcher explained that the system has two simple parts: a transmitter that sends out radio waves, and a receiver tag that accepts the signals and reflects radio waves back to the reader. With the help of a scanner using a data processing unit and artificial intelligence, the results are then interpreted and uploaded to the cloud, where they can be accessed via the Internet with farmers’ cell phones.

The receiver tag material is inert and flexible. Its developers say it could be potentially formed into ear tags, udder tags, or skin patches, as curvature does not affect its ability to function. The system can be set for various parameters that dairy managers wish to monitor, such as animal body temperature, locomotion, hydration, and general well-being.

Rather said the scanners, which still are under development, could potentially be hand-held units – possibly even cell phones. Another method to routinely gather data would be to place the scanners in an area on the farm through which cows routinely pass, such as the milking parlor or a sort gate.

Because the system contains no batteries or electronics, the unit do not have to be recharged, and will not contribute to electronic waste. Rather noted the receiver tags also will be low-cost relative to electronically based systems. He said the system also will promote animal welfare and dairy sustainability, two of VistaMilk’s foundational principles.

While the VistaMilk team developed the system for dairy production, they pointed out the technology also could have myriad applications in human health monitoring.

The dairy monitoring system is still in the prototype stage, but Rather is optimistic that it will move rapidly into scaled-up production for commercial use. He predicted the technology will be ready for on-farm use within five years or less.

For more on technology, read:

'Fitbit' for Cows to Debut at National Western Stock Show

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 04:13:16 GMT

Shoot Em Up, a well-known Texas longhorn from Ellicott, was ready for his Twitter performance during the National Western Stock Show parade. The weather, however, was not.

That didn’t faze Melissa Brandao, the woman behind the Longmont startup HerdDogg. The company has developed a small, rugged Bluetooth-enabled device designed to improve herd health and profitability by giving ranchers an easy-to-use, affordable tracking and data gathering system.

Instead of the parade, which was clearly going to be a snowy challenge, HerdDogg systems will debut with Shoot Em Up’s assistance at the Wild West Show on Jan. 14 and 15 at the National Western.

At the same time, Brandao and her small team of tech gurus are pushing hard to send out the first batch of commercially available smart tags this spring. She describes them as the equivalent of a Fitbit, except for very large, non-verbal mammals, reported the Daily Camera .

Social media savvy steers

When Shoot Em Up, who weighs nearly 1 ton, shows off the new technology during the National Western Stock Show, he’ll be sending out tweets letting the audience know, for instance, how fast he’s walking, how many steps he’s taking and his internal temperature, among other things.

This information once was collected manually by ranchers as they physically inspected their animals — often multiple times a day — looking for those who were ailing or who were preparing to give birth.

The advent of Bluetooth technologies, which allow data to be gathered and stored locally, and cellphones have changed all that, according to Brandao.

Now, using HerdDogg, a cow with one of the young company’s tags implanted in its ear can walk up to a watering trough in a far-flung pasture and take a drink of water. While the animal drinks, the data from the HerdDogg tag is being gathered by a device attached to the trough, which the young company calls a dog bone. The data stays at the trough in the rugged, plastic, bone-shaped device, ready for a rancher to collect it via an app on a cellphone.

If the rancher is standing in a field, he or she simply taps the icon on the cellphone that reflects the numbered tag of the cow being monitored, and information on that cow appears. In addition, an LED light in the tag lights up.

“Our goal is to create a technology that is rancher friendly,” Brandao said. “The data is stored and transmitted when the rancher needs it.”

Ranch animals have been tagged for years. In the early days, the simple plastic tags held a number that was the animal’s ID. Then, as production became more sophisticated, the United States Department of Agriculture, began requiring radio ID tags.

But HerdDogg is helping take the ag tag into a new world of precision agriculture, where animals can be tracked remotely, around the clock, without the use of tall radio towers or expensive networks. With more data, producers can make better-informed decisions that should help them improve herd health and profitability.

Brandao said she believes the technology can allow small- and medium-sized producers to grow their herds without having to add staff, a critical factor in an industry in which family farms are shrinking in number and consolidation is rampant.

Healthier cows, greener pastures

Ryan Rhoades, who is Colorado State University’s statewide extension specialist for beef producers, said devices such as the HerdDogg tag can help ranchers finely tune their operations, improving the health of herds and saving money by reducing the need for expensive drugs and veterinary visits required when animals go from simply feeling poorly to actually being sick.

They can also help improve the sustainability of ranching by, for instance, helping ranchers track which areas of pasture land cattle are using for grazing, and then redistributing the cattle to ensure lands aren’t overgrazed.

“Producers are looking for strategies to be more sustainable,” Rhoades said, “to increase their efficiency and to increase the bottom line. They’re also looking for tools to improve herd management and health.”

Antibiotic resistance and medication use in feedlots is a big issue, Rhoades said.

“Historically, we’ve not been very good at diagnosing sickness,” he said. “There is a consumer perception that we’re treating everything and mass medicating. This kind of tech allows us to be much more precise. With the price of drugs these days, there is probably a significant reduction in medication cost as well.”

The White House and reality TV

Shoot Em Up isn’t the only one who has been tracking HerdDogg’s progress, of course. The young company, which relocated to Longmont last summer after launching in Oregon in 2013, has already raised $750,000 and is seeking another $1 million to $2 million this year.

It spent much of last year participating in an agriculture-based Techstars program in Minneapolis and Brandao and her team won a visit to the White House in 2015 as part of a demo-days program. They were also featured on Intel’s reality TV show, “America’s Greatest Makers,” in 2015.

Rob Schultz is managing partner of Champaign, Ill.-based Serra Ventures, a venture capital company with an interest in ag technologies.

Schultz and his partners invested $500,000 in HerdDogg and plan to participate in the next finance round as well.

Prior to backing HerdDogg, Serra had invested in a data-gathering technology used on tractors, an investment that paid off when the company was acquired by the giant Monsanto Corp.

“That was all about creating data sets to allow farmers to be more precise and improve yields. The next great frontier is livestock,” Shultz said.

“Imagine you’re a rancher. All of your assets are roaming around outside your immediate access and control, and you have very little information on them. Being here in the Midwest, I talked to friends who are farmers and ranchers and was able to get their perspective. If they could save one cow or even detect illness earlier and treat it with one antibiotic shot rather than a vet visit, these are big deals for these farmers.”

Pilot projects and social media

As with all startups, much work lies ahead. For now, the chips that go into the tags are manufactured in Brooklyn, N.Y., and quality control is being done in Longmont.

New algorithms are being developed almost weekly, including those that will measure how often a cow is eating, chewing and swallowing, or “ruminating” as they say in the ag world.

The technology is being tested in California, Oregon, Colorado and Brazil and HerdDogg has several notable partners, including Land O’ Lakes and Shoot Em Up’s home operation, the Silverado Ranch east of Colorado Springs in Ellicott.

Gary Lake, who owns Silverado Ranch with Stan Searle, has 10 Texas longhorns in the pilot program. The full herd — 150 strong — graze on roughly 2.5 square miles of open pasture and Lake has attached the plastic dog-bone devices on watering troughs through the range area.

While he’s impressed with the biometric data the tags gather, he loves the novelty of its interface with social media apps such as Twitter and Instagram.

“Most people who buy Texas longhorn cattle have just a few head. They love them for their color and horns. These are the kind of people who will really enjoy getting a tweet from a cow as she is heading up to the house from the pasture,” Lake said.

While Brandao is a big believer in social media, she has her eye on the worldwide livestock market, which is 2 billion animals strong.

“I’m not a rancher,” she said. “But it is so exciting to be around animals who’ve never had a voice. Maybe this will help ranching become more common again.”