Adorable alternative energy

Gaia Vince explains how a sustainable farm in Peru runs on guinea pig power.

No, it does not involve hundreds of tiny exercise wheels. (Although that would be pretty damn cute, too.)

Instead, every month, the farmers process more than 400 pounds of guinea pig poop into combustible gas—and a liquid byproduct that works as plant food—by allowing bacteria to break the waste down in a warm, oxygen-free environment. It's called anaerobic digestion, and it's a process that's increasingly popular on American farms, as well. Dairy farms—with their easy access to lots of consolidated cow shit—in particular.

What's cool about this Peruvian model is that it shows you don't necessarily need fancy, expensive equipment to make anaerobic digestion work. The process can be applied at different levels of tech intensity, depending on resources, location and how much energy you actually want to produce. This Peruvian family makes enough gas for themselves, plus a little extra. Meanwhile, a dairy farm in Wisconsin uses the gas to make electricity that they sell back to the utility company. All told, there's enough to power 70 households.

Image: Some rights reserved by MJames

• [Anonymous]

  mmm cuy

  I lived in Peru for several months and ate quite a few of the little critters, they are delicious! They run around the farms in a little flock like chickens or something.

  I never saw any of the families use the waste for anything (of course they were all small-scale family farms, nothing like the one in the article), but with cuy being such a staple and such an important part of celebrations, I imagine that if something like this caught on it would make a big difference.

• [thefinder]

  I never thought I’d say this but I’ll take “awesome” over “adorable” any day. In fact, if I see the word “adorable” on a headline one more time….well, you get the idea. I also resent being told what my response is supposed to be to any given subject. “Gorgeous late summer photos”, etc.
  I’ll be the judge of that.

• [Mitch]

  Those guinea pigs all have intact ears! The farmers must be doing something right.

  The guinea pigs I worked with at a lab animal breeding facility usually chewed each other’s ears off. This was the norm and sometimes the supervisor would say “Look at the beautiful ears on that one!” about the rare on with intact ears. They even had “good ears” and “bad ears” rubber stamps for their order paperwork.

  Maybe it’s the hay. The lab animal breeder didn’t give them hay because they didn’t think they could sterilize it adequately.

• [Red Zebra]

  That’s my guinea pig!!!!!!!

  No, really, she looks identical to our piggy Pumpkin. Here’s a pic of her reading a book:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/7300247@N08/4964773859/

  And which book do guinea pigs prefer, you ask?

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/7300247@N08/4965376172

  Obviously!!

• [jhm]

  As practical and efficient as this might be, without some discussion of the inputs into the production of the animals’ feed, it cannot be assumed that this is sustainable.

  Just because this would be a better way to deal with farm animal waste than dump it into the river, doesn’t contradict the idea that such a system is ultimately dependent on petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides (although it very well might be, I admit to no specific knowledge). The systems you describe could very well be worth doing, and still not be sustainable in the long term, although their small scale recommends them.

• [SeamusAndrewMurphy]

  How many g-pigs does this farm have to produce 400 pounds per month? This place must be swimming in them.

  • [gATO]

    Well, I have two guinea pigs, and they’re a lovely poo factory. The thing is, cavies’ digestive system is not very efficient: mine eat about 7 kg of assorted vegetables each week (spoilt little bastards!), and I’d say they produce between one half to one kilogram of poop every week.

• [JulianR]

  Er… That’s pretty commom over here in Europe. Not few farms use the animal waste to produce energy. There are many schemes to sell the unused electricity to the communities. Maybe not with Guinea Pigs, but with real pigs. (What does a guinea pig farm do, anyway? Produce guinea pigs? For… meat? Laboratories? Fur? Fun? Energy?)

  • [princessalex]

    It’s not a guinea pig farm — it’s an agricultural farm. Guinea pigs happen to be members of their farm, producing their fuel. And, as to what happens after they’ve used them for fuel (from the article):

    “And the animals? Well, after they’ve pooed and copulated to the ripe old age of 18 months or so, they are sold for a good price to Lima’s upscale restaurants and organic food stores. Mmm, rico!”

    • [peterbruells]

      The “upscale” bit is a bit misleading.Guinea pigs are a normal food source in the Andes, as they thrive on greens which would be otherwise unusable. Too humans, of course.

      • [sdmikev]

        Upscale is the adjective used for the restaurants, not the guinea pigs themselves.
        OT: Very cool story, thanks for the post!

  • [Anonymous]

    in Peru it is typically for meat

• [Opacity]

  This is really neat! I know that tons of people use their guinea pigs’ poop for fertilizer (it works really well for that) — but not for actual energy. If I still had my five-pig group (which has dwindled down over the years to just one), I might consider it to power my house ;-)

  Also, interesting fact – guinea pigs can’t run on exercise wheels. Their back aren’t built for it (same goes for the hamster ball things).

• [Anonymous]

  Methane is a 15-20 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The conversion of methane into energy and CO2 thus gives you lots of credits to sell. And your customers can buy appliances that run on low-pressure methane at any Sears Roebuck all over the world.

  Sewage methane is the answer to the oil problem; if we banned burning petrochemicals starting in 2012, and we’d have the greatest overnight industrial boom (and attendent economic prosperity) the world has ever seen.

  But, of course, that might just result in poor people getting rich, or rich people getting poor – so it won’t be happening.

• [sergeirichard]

  [blockquote]What’s cool about this Peruvian model is that it shows you don’t necessarily need fancy, expensive equipment to make anaerobic digestion work.[/blockquote]

  Back in the 70s, my father made a methane generator out of two oil barrels welded together, powered by two small pigs. OK, it didn’t make a lot of gas – but it sure as hell wasn’t fancy or expensive!

• [magnetiquewolf]

  This is the same type of technology used by the Living Machine company/concept, otherwise known as a “waste water treatment facility”, or “open pond waste water energy facility” or a variety of names thereof.

  I keep pushing for the city of Montreal to integrate waste water energy facilities (Living Machine facilities) since our current municipal plumbing system is crumbling to pieces and is in fire need of replacement and upgrade. If our city is going to replace the entire system anyway they may as well spend an extra few bucks and integrate Living Machines into the system and recoup energy costs and waste disposal costs. The system would eventually pay itself off over the long term.

  Montreal has many public parks with small ponds and lakes already in place, all connected to the municipal water line. They could turn the old Olympic Stadium into the central processing unit and also turn it into an all-year indoor public park while they’re at it and even charge a nominal membership fee for those who want to visit the park. Considering our long, cold winters, an indoor park (with trees, ponds, wildlife) would bring in millions of visitors per year, which would bring in tens of millions of dollars in funding.

  Win-win concept all the way. All cities and towns should be moving towards integrating Living Machine technology into their municipal water and waste systems. Some municipalities already have…

• [anwaya]

  Methane is a nearly spherical molecule, and this geometry gives it a broader absorption spectrum compared with rod-like CO2. It therefore has a higher Global Warming Potential (GWP in the literature), so capturing a mol of it before it gets into the atmosphere is much better than capturing a mol of CO2. Methane capture projects are an important part of carbon offset programs.

• [bcsizemo]

  The “present” meet Mad Max, and Tina Turner’s Barter Town.

  2 men enter, 1 man leave!

• [the_pants]

  Very disappointed this has nothing to do with wiring their little brains to a virtual world and using their living bodies as batteries.

• [Nadreck]

  Cavies are the bomb. They are very hard workers at producing poop as they really don’t have any appetite control: put it in front of them and they’ll dine till they drop. They’re as good to eat as rabbits but you get a much higher percentage of usable meat as Guinea Pigs don’t have those big feet. They’re quite genetically unstable and will produce all sorts of weirdy fur coats but in the wild anything that’s not ground coloured and short haired gets eaten real fast. If startled, by a hawk shadow or some such, a group of guinea pigs will “explode” with each piggie choosing an escape vector as far away from the others as possible: so 6 guinea pigs will run 60 degrees away from each other. It is not known if they work this out beforehand or if they have some quick real-time algorithm. Domesticated cavies sometimes learn to whistle for their food but this sound isn’t made in the wild.

• [Grimnir]

  Saw a video this week about a farm in Wisconsin that grows 1 million pounds of food a year on 3 acres, all in greenhouses that are heated in part from the excess heat of compost piles. Going one step further and collecting the methane just makes it that much better.

  I’ve met a dairy farmer in Vermont who was collecting the methane from his manure. He said it not only made enough electricity to power his entire farm, he was actually getting a sizable check from the power company every month.

  Shit works, what can I say?

• [funchy]

  NOT adorable. Biofuels from livestock manure only works when you have *lots* of it piling up in a closed shed — as in the dirty world of factory farming. These are not happy critters frolicking in the sunshine.

  We wouldn’t need these creative ways to dispose of massive quantities of livestock waste if we didn’t have high-density farming. Factory farmed meat as a source of food is inefficient and a good source of biohazards and pollution.

  Instead of doing mass confinement farming, let’s skip a step: use the feed corn straight for biofuel as alternative energy and save yourself the nasty job of dealing with dead animals and disease.

• [rbean]

  Methane digesters have been around forever. Whenever I hear complaints about factory farms and their huge lagoons of manure, I wonder why they’re not cashing in by producing methane with it– in the business world, that’s called “leaving money on the table”. It seems like some entrepreneur should step in and offer to take the stuff off their hands, and sell the methane and/or electricity. But to do that, they’d need financing, which is hard to come by at the moment.

  The linked article talks about a dairy farm in Minnesota, not Wisconsin. Interestingly, it quotes an “expert” saying it wouldn’t be cost-effective on a smaller scale– such as the one in Peru you’re talking about above. As in any business, the key is keeping the overhead low (eg, by not buying the most expensive available equipment).

• [inphiknit]

  If you are interested in seeing another interesting small scale anaerobic digester, check out Afrigadget dot com. It is an incredible site anyway as it features loads of homegrown ingenuity at work.

• [dainel]

  What about people poo? How much can you collect from a family of 5?