Creating Renewable Energy From Chickens

John Logan at his chicken manure digester in Prentiss, Mississippi

Mississippi has one of the largest poultry industries in the country. But it’s what one farmer is doing with those chickens to make renewable energy that is getting all the attention lately. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports.

John Logan didn’t set out to become a pioneer in the energy field; he just wanted to raise chickens.

“I always had it in my mind when I retired I wanted to grow chickens. So the first thing I did I built five chicken houses. I had to learn it all from scratch.”

That was 15 years ago. Today, on his fifth generation 1000 acre family farm in Prentiss Mississippi, Logan has ten chicken houses, with 275,000 broiler chickens. Logan, who calls himself an avid conservationist, realized that all the chicken manure he was producing was starting to affect his water,

“The phosphorous content got so high, and I realized I got to do something I can’t be putting this on the ground. I have a river right here. What’s to happen when that phosphorus overload washes into the river and then ends up in the Gulf of Mexico?”

Logan knew he had to something, so he turned to a manure digester used mainly on cattle farms that turns methane gas into a renewable energy.

“I just felt like the manure that we had coming out of the barns was much more potent.”

Dr. Mark Zappi, dean of engineering at University of Louisiana Lafayette was at a meeting in Hattiesburg when Logan asked for his help.

“This guy pulls up in a truck and he hands me a bucketful of chicken litter and he says, we would like you to look at this, and we think we have something here. John’s idea did pan out and his dream went from a little bucket of a concept to a full scale operating unit.”

I met John Logan in his Prentiss office, the new home of Eagle Energy. From his desk he looks over his ten chicken houses – now completely powered by the energy he creates from his chicken manure. Logan now holds the patent and is the creator of the first successful broiler poultry digester in the world. Logan says what was once just waste - has turned into major savings.

“When we went online the first time the previous month, my power bill was like $8000 dollars, and it went the next month to about $200 dollars. The next month I got a small check from the power company.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has been promoting the use of anaerobic digesters to capture livestock methane since 1993, when they created something called the AgSTAR program. The program’s Chris Voell says the expanded use of digesters could have dramatic impacts on the environment. The problem he says is using the digesters for small energy projects.

“There has to be a realization that some of the policies in place will need to change, in order to make this realistic for the livestock producers.”

Just down the road from Logan’s office sits chicken house number 10, a long white rectangular building. Inside 36,000 week old chickens are milling about water and feed dispensers.

“It’s hot and kind of steamy in here.”

The chicken houses are kept surprisingly warm, 85 degrees. Logan says that’s another reason producing his own energy comes in handy. The chickens which are raised for Tyson foods will spend 38 days living in the house before being processed. And in that time they produce a lot of manure. None of it is wasted. Logan feeds 4 tons of manure into his digester each day, a large structure resembling a water tower that sits just down the road next to piles of dry chicken litter.

“This is the decayed chicken litter, and that is loaded once a day into a tank over here, and it is down in the ground and from there it is mixed.”

The chicken manure is mixed with bacteria and then heated, a process which traps the methane and turns it into the natural gas. For areas with high concentrations of broiler chicken operations, this new technology could have major implications. Logan has four chicken digesters up and running in Mississippi, and is in the process of building two others in Maryland and Delaware. He is also in contract with companies in Italy, Australia, and India But he says the important thing is that his farm is now carbon neutral and that was the goal in the first place.

I firmly believe an old Indian proverb that is we don’t own this land, we are borrowing it from our children and our grandchildren. If I can leave it in a better state than I found it. I think that is satisfaction enough.

For MPB News, I’m Phoebe Judge.