Holy Clean Energy Cow

by Dan Morrison

Tuesday November 25, 2008 at 12:39am, EST

“A gai che.” It was the first thing I learned to say in Gujarati. “This is a cow.” Gai, bhens (water buffalo), balad (ox) are everywhere. Meandering through urban traffic. Venturing down the high way. Filling the rural villages. These large bovines are a family’s lifeline, providing milk and all its byproducts ghee (butter), paneer (tofu-like cheese), etc.) for family use and to sell if there is excess. They are the power in the fields, and a mode of transport in the street.

They also leave their waste everywhere. A buffalo consumes massive amounts of food, turning 40-60 kilograms (132 pounds) of grass into 8-10 kilogram of dung a day (with 15-18 liters of milk – sells in the market 22 rupees for 1 liter). Much of the dung is collected for fertilizer and handmade into patties that are burned as cooking fuel.

Manjuben and her husband Ramjibhai are obsessed with cow dung. They live in Vigori Village in Kutch district of Gujarat, India and every morning they collect 25 kilograms of it from their four cows.

When you enter their yard, the first thing you see is a 3x6 foot rectangle cement tank filled with a slurry of manure and water (as we removed the temporary cover, I braced for the stench, but it didn’t smell). Next to it is a 6-foot diameter cement dome, and next to that is a 4-foot high input/mixing tank. This is their biogas plant that produces all the gas they need for cooking for the day.

To make it work, Ramjibhai collects the manure produced by the four cattle that he keeps in a small pen next to their house. The cows supply enough manure in the morning and night to satisfy the family’s gas needs. In the rare case they need more, Ramjibhai can pay or barter for his neighbors manure.
The manure, 25-kilograms, is put in the mixing tank every morning and mixed with 25-liters of water. From the mixer, it goes into the main tank (the dome) where it creates methane gas.

By morning, the biogas plant has produced 2 hours of gas, enough for Manjuben to cook breakfast for her family of five. By dinner, there is another 2-hour supply available.

The processed manure escapes to the overflow tank, which Ramjibhai collects and uses as organic fertilizer to grow mug (the grain for making dal). One-year’s worth of biogas-created “waste” is enough to fertilize a small farm, restoring soil nutrients and increasing crop yield.

For Manjuben, it means less time collecting wood and more time in the fields earning a wage. “Before we had biogas, I collected wood from 9AM to 1PM. Now I just go outside and turn on the biogas valve. The time I would have spent collecting wood is now spent working as a laborer in the fields. The money I earn pays for my children’s education. Before we had biogas, they needed to collect wood and work so we could survive.”

The biogas solutions 1Well and SEWA are helping provide cost about $500 and take 15-20 days to construct. They provide a clean energy source and eliminate CO2 emissions and reduce environmental damage caused by wood collection and burning. This technology helps increase income by increasing a woman’s ability to work and by increasing crop yields due to free organic fertilizer.

To sponsor or donate to a 1Well biogas project, email May Yu (). We will have our new biogas projects available at www.1well.org shortly.