Waste not Want not
US - Standing outside one of Willie Humphrey's five turkey barns, there are no visual indicators that you're adjoining the litter box of 5,000 Thanksgiving birds. The muffled clucks and calls are a far surer sign of where you are.Then, when the Richlands winds blow just right, the smell hits like a hundred pet shops distilled into a single, acrid gust. For Humphrey, though, the stench that occasionally wafts out from his barns isn't all that offensive.
"It smells like money to farmers," Humphrey said.
Humphrey, of course, is referring to the 12-week-old heavy toms that dwell within the 50-by-500 foot barn - not the, well, fowl odor. In the future, however, that smell could be more than the olfactory evidence of fertilizer; it could mean megawatts.
The Golden Leaf Foundation, the organization responsible for allocating half of the funds North Carolina received as part of the federal tobacco settlement in 1999, is entering its second year of funding research on the possibility of a poop-powered power plant.
Source: jdnews.com
22 March 2005
1 minute read
