Spreading the word

In a few weeks, I'll be leaving the Pacific Northwest (for the first time in almost a year!) to go speak about the Farm Power experience. On October 18th, I will be joining hundreds of bioenergy professionals in Des Moines for the BioCycle "Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling" conference. BioCycle magazine provides regular coverage of the digester industry along with composting and other types of waste recycling, so they draw a wide audience and we hope that BioCycle will bring this conference to our region in the future--by then we hope to have many more projects to talk about.

Meanwhile, our friends at NW Farms & Food recently wrote an story on our progress; like all the articles on the website, this one combines depth with clarity, but it also managed to capture the genesis of Farm Power better than I'd ever heard it expressed--with one of my quotes, no less!

"I was thinking about manure digesters [in 2004], but I figured that by the time I could do anything, half the farmers in the county would already be working on their own project. Lo and behold a year later — nothing. Nothing at all!”

“So that’s when we headed down this path,” he said. “If nobody was doing it, yet it was clear that it could be done, that it should be done, then we just had to figure out a better way to do it!”

And we continue to work every day to get digesters built throughout the Pacific Northwest, coming up with little innovations that--unexceptional by themselves--add up to real renewable energy projects that otherwise wouldn't happen. Construction on Farm Power Lynden is nearly complete, and regular readers know we're pushing forward on other biogas installations. I'll try to post a little more often this fall to keep spreading the word online as well as on the road.