Sheep "tractor"

Here's the long awaited fully-developed rotational grazing set-up at MOFGA. Eight sheep (four ewes and four lambs) occupy a 328-foot circumference round enclosure made of Premier brand two-wire electric fence. A small shade/rain shelter provides a home base. the shelter is on wheels and can be pulled around. It has a feed trough inside (made from a left-over section of four-inch sewer pipe sawn in half -- everything in this set-up was recycled from a previous use).

The sheep are fed a small amount of local grain daily in their shelter. That and its presence as their friendly rain and sun shade accustoms them to going in and out of the shelter daily. But, the nasty secret is, there's a gate, and so the sheep can be captured using the shelter. And while they're caught, you can move the fence 90% over to a new patch of grass, leaving the shelter on the 10% overlap. No sheepdogs or other high-tech sheep moving systems needed. Sorry, Mr. Haggis.

Just be sure to move the shelter to the right overlap point before trapping your sheep.

Very crafty, Mick. We'll see if it works. I'm sure either we, or the sheep, can find a way to screw it up.

Also pictured is the other grass-mowing system at MOFGA, a guy on a tractor. We expect to phase him out eventually. Not quite though. Experience has shown that some trimming is still needed from time to time even with a sheep-mowing job. But much less mowing overall is needed, about a 90% reduction, much less hours of work total once you've got the system figured out, far less weed-whacking and corner trimming in general, and , and you get meat and wool back.

Why we ever though lawn-mowing was a good idea in the first place, is beyond me.

Biogas digesters

Nothing particularly new -- twenty-five years ago at Findhorn I roomed with a guy who designed these things for a living, albeit then for use in developing nations. What is new is the French town of Lille's use of the methane, suitably cleaned up and pressurized, for transportation.

Do you think that all the number twos from 360 residential students, and a few sheep, might be enough to run our van fleet? Now that would be s... hot!
Digesting the problem
Britain has fallen well behind much of Europe when it comes to utilizing manure from farms and waste from abattoirs and food processors to create gas and electricity. But that could soon change. Terry Slavin reports

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Fire up your (chicken) tractors

Today we made one of the two animal shelters we are to make for MOFGA this summer. Here are some shots of the construction process. This chicken tractor is designed to be for show only, ie, to display birds at the fair, so it doesn't need a weasel-proof coop like the one we have at home, just a shelter and some perches.

I was helped by Aaron, who also drove truck, getting out of the office for most of the afternoon. The design is a copy of Sara's nationally famous chicken tractor, which appeared in Organic Gardening magazine as well as the MOFGA newspaper.

The weather here in mid-Maine was an improvement for work like this. The mug cleared right out and the air dried up nicely, after days of high humidity. Unfortunately, I finished getting my firewood in yesterday, so I was done with the last of the really heavy work for a while. Still it was nice to be drier while working in the sun. And we had a nice gardener's summer shower at least at Unity if not in Jackson.

Also pictured are the Womerlippi Farm sheep, using a picnic table as a shelter. This in preparation for tomorrows job: to make a sheep shelter for use at the fairgrounds. This will differ from our picnic table by being on wheels so the college's shepherds can pull it around easily. As you can see, sheep aren't fussy about shade. They use whatever they can find close at hand, even if they have access to formal shelters.

Uncommon common sense.

Regular readers will have noticed that I'm not writing much about renewable energy and energy efficiency this summer. This isn't because I don't have any projects on. I've done a bit of free consulting around the region, and am still measuring the wind at the Mount View site and getting worked up to measure the wind at a new site in Troy, Maine.

But what I write about tends to be what's on my mind, and what's on my mind right now is the stuff I gots to get done at the Womerlippi Farm and Garden Enterprise. Not to mention the rotational grazing project at MOFGA. Today's job will be the sheep shelter and chicken tractor replacement mentioned a couple posts back. Plus the UK media continues to razz on the food crisis. And what I've been noticing are the bugbears that food advocates have, and the backlashes they create.

As an advocate for, and teacher of, small scale local agriculture and horticulture, and because I'm trained as a scientist and policy wonk, I like to help folks keep their motivations sorted out. Too much muddled environmentalism makes for unpopular environmentalism, and if we could all just keep our bugbears at bay we'd get further with the average Joe, who after all is amenable to common sense, but sensibly shies clear of fetishism.

One such bugbear is purism of any kind, whether organic, local, zero-carbon, whatever. The single minded pursuit of any one of these always appears to me to be counter-productive, a bugbear.

So, for instance, the banning of caffeine at the MOFGA Fairgrounds. I've been a card-carrying member of MOFGA for a long time, but why, in this age of high quality, shade-grown, fair-trade, organic coffee, is the dreaded black stuff still banned from the fair? Because someone on the MOFGA board had a bugbear about it, that's why. And to 99% of fair-goers, it seems really silly, and so, as a result, some of them begin to laugh at, and are turned off by, MOFGA's other messages, most of which are quite reasonable.

Likewise GMO foods. I really don't enjoy the prospect of Monsanto "taking over" developing world agriculture by patenting genetic resources. But does that mean that all GMO organisms are bad? Of course not. One of these days we'll patent the GMO organism that cures cancer, or malaria, or that makes carbon-neutral liquid fuel from algae fed on seawater. Blanket opposition to GMO is another bugbear that most ordinary people thankfully, see right through.

Organic food seems to me to be becoming a bugbear these days. When I'm faced with a choice between local Maine produce grown using fertilizers and pesticides, and out-of-state stuff that is squeaky-clean organic, I go for the local every time. Since the recent USDA regulations organic certification is now somewhat captured by industry anyway, at least at the national level. We really should fess up to that and become more circumspect about organic certification.

I'm not even going to talk about carbon neutrality, except to say that it's possible, and it frequently happens, that we become obsessed by this bugbear such that a corporation goes to extreme and expensive lengths to become carbon neutral in one building or one transportation scheme as a "showcase" when the same organization has dozens of other buildings and vehicles that haven't even been considered. A decent across the board percentage reduction, with all the low hanging fruit well-picked, is sign of considered carbon mitigation, not the "one showcase building" syndrome.

All of this purism and faddism contributes to the image that many ordinary people have of environmentalists as strange types with strange agendas, and not much common sense.

One of the great gifts that first British and then American free speech gave to the world is political satire. Purists everywhere are wide open to this lowest, yet funniest, form of political wit. Another is the leveling that occurs when our lords and masters are exposed for the twits they are. How are the mighty fallen, when their bugbears are exposed on Comedy Central or You Tube. And how we vulgar Anglo-Americans love to see 'em fall. There's many a dictator around the world who shudders at the thought of all the satirical endeavors the west has waiting for him, the day he dares to leave the safety of Upper Gondolia.

But when our bugbears allow that same Hogarthian satire, which knows no safety barrier, to be turned against the environmental movement, in this day and age of real environmental worries like climate change or food scarcity, we all lose. A capable, reasoned pragmatism is the best antidote.

I'm really enjoying my morning coffee today. Are you?

Advice on household wind turbines in Maine

Advice distilled from consults on local wind turbine projects, and from our friends at NRG Systems, Inc.:

Most folks think about getting a wind turbine to make "greenbacks" and to be "green." A minority need one becuase they lack grid-based electricity service. But put a turbine in the wrong spot, and you will lose money and waste precious resources: neither greenbacks, nor green! And even an off-grid turbine can be outperformed dollar for dollar by solar panels if it is in the wrong place.

(I'm starting a photo-collection of "turbines in the wrong place," for the edification of our students, who can learn from other's mistakes.)

First decide what it is you are trying to achieve. Be deadpan honest. Are you really worried about energy bills, or do you just want to be "green?" Or is it that you'd like to be free of foreign oil? All are legitimate reasons, and certainly, I can't help you much with figuring out your motives. But it helps me advise you if you've actually figured them out as honestly as you can.

If you just want to be green, and are not at all motivated by saving money, I can't help much there either because there's no analysis to be done. Go buy whatever turbine you like, and good luck to you.

If you want primarily to save money, and being green is a secondary motive, start with an overall household energy assessment, not a wind assessment. Before you decide to spring for several thousand dollars of turbine, you would like to know if you could save more money by putting the same investment into insulation, windows and doors, new bio-mass or other green fuel heating systems, or new appliances. I recommend the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Home Energy Saver, an online audit program. Better yet, hire a professional energy auditor. Be sure to pick lower hanging energy fruit before you spring for that wind turbine. These fruit can be surprising "rich." Say you're running an outdated 1970s fridge, at perhaps 800 watts per hour, 24/7. Replacing it with an EPA Energy Star-rated 300WH fridge for $1,000 will save you 24 times 500 watts per day, or 12KWH. That's far more watts per day than you'll get out of a 1KWH turbine for much the same money, since the wind doesn't blow every day! The fridge is a far better investment than the turbine.

So go figure, literally. You probably have some wasteful appliances that will save you more moolah than a fancy new turbine. I recommend the "Kill-a-watt" meter, which you can buy online, to help you measure the energy performance of your plug-in appliances. For wired-in devices, just turn it on and go watch your meter turn to get an idea of energy usage. Read the dial on the meter in watts and kilowatts. Be sure to turn it off when you're done!

Once you have logically eliminated all more cost-efficient energy savings, it's possible you might benefit financially from a wind turbine. How do you figure this out? Well, first you need to know if you have a viable site. In general, you need average wind speeds of more than 10 mph to make reasonable quantities of power from the new generation of turbines, and you would prefer to have even more wind than that to get the best return on your investment. Although some models are advertised as producing power at wind speeds as low as 7mph, there's not much point putting a $15,000 turbine on a 7mph site if a 15mph one is available.

In Maine, these higher average wind speeds are common on ridges and on the coast. Sites open to the southwest, northeast and northwest are best. If you are in a valley, you probably don't have the wind. Even if you do have a good site, you have to get your turbine well above the interference of trees and buildings: "ground clutter," you might call it. I generally recommend quite high towers for woodsy sites.

Looking at the features of your site, and having lived there for a while all help, but you're still guessing. There are two ways to determine scientifically whether your site is viable. One is to put up a wind turbine and see how it does, recording the production data. The other is to put up wind assessment equipment for a year, and record the wind speed and direction data. If you decide you want a small scale turbine, on the order of 1-5 KWH, probably $1,000-$5,000 and you have the money, it may be cheaper to simply put up a turbine and see how well it works than to do a wind assessment first.

If you want a larger turbine, above 5KWH or so, I would recommend collecting a year's data before investing in a turbine. Equipment for measuring the wind is expensive too, but various firms provide the equipment. Other firms erect the assessment towers and collect the data for you.

At Unity College we do wind assessment for community wind projects (not commercial ones) using equipment provided by NRG Systems incorporated, a sponsor of the college and the market share leader and standard-setter. This allows us to train students in the use of the equipment, and more importantly in the science, engineering, economics, policy and math associated with the wind power industry. Current projects include the community wind assessment site at Mount View High School in Waldo County, Maine, and a project to make a household scale wind assessment tower for smaller turbine installations.

Photographed here are students working on the Mount View project.

Definitions of sustainability

One of my projects this academic year was to re-write the wikipedia page on sustainability. This sort of thing is usually a thankless task, because as soon as you've finished, either the wikipedia editors or worse, some fool who knows squat about the topic, re-writes what you write. But the page has stood the test of time, and about 80% of the key text on definitions is still mine, which makes me think I did a decent and interesting job.

Read it here if you're interested.

I went over to MOFGA's fairgrounds today to check on our sheep again. We've had no end of trouble with our fence in this rotational grazing experiment, but we seem to have it sorted now. The ground there before the recent storms was bone dry, so no ground connection would work, and we were trying to use two panels of a short kind of fence with a positive-only system. We cut out that stuff out after the 3rd or 4th escape and are just using the Premier 48-inch built-in ground fence. Sheep are generally happier if they are securely fenced, and so are we.

This tarp-covered chicken tractor was modified as a shelter but the frame proved rotten and it as you can see the structure was troubled a good deal by the storm winds, so we will replace it soon with a purpose built movable sheep shelter and provide MOFGA with a new chicken tractor to replace the bad one, most likely a super-sized version of Sara's field-proven design here.

Tuesday is build-day for these two projects. The lumber is coming from Peter Baldwin's famous apple-ladder mill and experimental sustainability site, where from time to time Unity students go to seek either employment or ideas. Peter thriftily makes his apple-ladders out of big-toothed aspen, Populus grandidentata, which many loggers cannot tell apart from quaking aspen. Big-tooth aspen has relatively high quality lumber for making apple ladders. Quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides, known as "popple"or "poplar" in Maine, does not. So once Peter has taught his suppliers to tell the difference, they get to sell a log they thought came from a "weed tree" and he gets very inexpensive raw material for apple ladders. I use his reject lumber all the time for projects because it's a) cheap b) strong. c) withstands rot surprisingly well, and d) supremely local. All of which surprises guests to the farm who don't know these are two different trees.

There's also a photo of the kind of graze thats available there, a nice mix of grasses with red and white clover. Quite a bit of bluegrass which is stemmy, but otherwise not bad stuff. A lot of the graze there is dry, though, or was until the storms, and sparse or stemmy.

The last photo is an experimental solar thermal system being built at MOFGA by Jay, a local solar designer and contractor. He plans to make a home-built trickle collector of massive but cost-efficient size on these racks, and connect it to the interior heating for the MOFGA barn. A very interesting experiment, and one you can be sure I'll watch, since it could be cookie cuttered by any decent carpenter, and won't cost a lot. I like that kind of approach.