Harold Bate, chicken farmer and inventor from Devon in south-west England says that you can power your motor vehicles with droppings from chickens, according to Current.

To prove his statement is no idle boast, Harold has been operating a 1953 Hillman and a five-ton truck on methane gas generated by decomposing pig and chicken manure for years. He claims that the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline costs him only about £0.03 and that the low-cost methane makes his vehicles run faster, cleaner and better than they operate on 'store-bought' fuel.

Detroit and the large petroleum interests keep saying it cannot be done but the 62-year-old English inventor has already done it. Mr Bate has developed a small conversion unit that makes any ordinary automobile virtually pollution-free by running it on methane from composting animal droppings and sewage.