Holstein No. 2699 gazes warily over Shawn Saylor’s shoulder. The 39 other cows lining the stainless-steel stalls of the milking parlor at Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farm appear unperturbed—by two strangers or by the vacuum pumps being swiftly attached to their udders. “They’re very particular,” notes Saylor, a fourth-generation dairy farmer. “Everything has got to be consistent.” No. 2699 gives one last measured look from under long lashes, lifts her tail and ejects a stream of runny, brown energy that, very soon, will help power the farm.
Most people don’t think of manure from 600 cows—18,000 gal, produced daily—as an asset; Saylor’s neighbors in Rockwood, Pa., certainly didn’t. Until two years ago, the waste was pumped to a holding pond on the property and spread on the fields every spring and fall. “You’d see a 2-ft crust floating down there that you could pretty much walk across,” Saylor says matter-of-factly. “The odor was unbelievable.”
A lot of people might not see a 50-gal drum of used cooking oil, flecked with bits of fried chicken, as a resource either. That’s why I asked my uncle, Dave Hubbard, to drive me here from West Virginia in his biodiesel Jetta TDI. Uncle Dave converts the waste oil from local taverns into fuel to run his car, a motorcycle and tractors for five farms, so I figured he and Saylor could trade tips.
Saylor, 35, is both practical and inventive—much like Uncle Dave. Above the Leatherman clipped to his belt, the sleeves of a well-worn blue work shirt are rolled up to the elbows; his face dimples from smiling even as he talks shop in the milking parlor. “There’s a recycle–flush system here,” Saylor says, activating a pump. Water recovered from other uses cascades across the floor, sweeping manure in murky streams down the length of the barn and into a tank at the mouth of an anaerobic digester.
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