Power to the Poultry

Benson is your classic small rural community. Reed Anfinson’s family has owned and published the Benson, Minnesota weekly newspaper for nearly 50 years. But like other small communities, he knows the challenges that come along with that small town charm. “Those higher paying jobs, head of household jobs are difficult to find in a smaller community. There are not a lot of those jobs. So the kids go away and they go to college and they find jobs elsewhere,” says Reed.

Greg Langmo’s family has been raising turkeys in Minnesota for 50 years “We are about a week away. In fact next Wednesday these turkeys will be on the truck,” says Greg about his 17 week old, 21 pound turkeys. 21 pounds in 17 weeks mean these birds are eating quite a bit. And that means quite a bit of something else - manure. And when you raise almost 50 thousand turkeys at a time that manure starts piling up. In fact, Minnesota raises 46 million turkeys a year. This gives farmers like Greg the challenge of what to do with all of that litter. Typically the solution was to spread it on farm fields as fertilizer, but due to Minnesota’s short window to grow crops in the spring and fall, a lot of that manure ends up in stockpiles. Greg says, “That’s the only use there was for it. Rural residential property owners were concerned that there was a lot of stockpiling going on. It wasn’t being handled in a way that they were comfortable with. They didn’t like the odor, they didn’t like the runoff. They didn’t like the flies.”

Reed Anfinson’s town needs jobs and Greg Langmo needs a better way to get rid of his turkey litter. This is where Terry Walmsley comes into the picture. “My kids call me a poopologist,” jokes Terry. He’s actually an executive with the British company Fibrowatt. And just about the time that Minnesota turkey farmers were thinking of ways to jettison turkey litter into space Terry and his Fibrowatt friends said something rather shocking, “There’s electricity in that there poop!” Terry goes on to mention, “This is a unique material that not only is a renewable resource, produce renewable energy. But it is actually doing an end benefit by managing something that is produced in excess.”

Fibrowatt’s plan was to build a giant generating plant that burns turkey litter to create electricity. Although with that came extreme skepticism from the Benson locals. Fibrowatt already has three plants generating juice in Great Britain so it didn’t take long for people to believe it could be done. But did they want tons of burning poultry poop a quarter mile down the road?

It didn’t take much to get Greg Langmo on board with the plan. But townspeople in Benson needed proof this deal didn’t literally stink. So, Fibrowatt invited Reed and Benson community leaders to tour their UK facilities and did a rather peculiar test - a sniff test. Reed says, “We went there with our noses, as the mayor had said. We did the sniff test. And it passed. Right away odor was the big concern. This was front page news – a big concern. Odor was the number one thing.”

After Reed’s successful “olfactory excursion” to England, his paper’s editorials began supporting the project. And after town meetings, more study, more trips and more sniffing, Benson became home to North America’s first turkey litter burning electricity generating plant. It’s called Fibrominn - as in Minnesota. And for the first time, folks around here started referring to turkey litter as “fuel”.

The Fribrominn plant operates all the time and has enough capacity to manage over a 100 trucks a day. Terry sums up the process: “These huge scoops just drop down and pull that stuff up and put it in the back there. And from the fuel hall onto a small conveyor belt that takes the litter to a boiler to be burned. Part of our process is to screen and de-lump, to try to remove those large patties. And once that “fuel” is in the burner, the process is pretty much what you learned in science class: burn the litter, boil water, make steam, drive a turbine and generate electricity.”

A quick look at a meter inside the plant will show you how much electricity is being produced. 62 megawatts. That’s about enough power for 50,000 homes. Fibrominn isn’t going to put any 15-hundred megawatt coal-fired plants out of business, but agricultural producers like Greg have another option for their litter. “Take this, get it out of here and it’s done. In one day they will haul this barn out in one day.” Says Greg.

Problem solved - The turkey litter is gone and Benson has about 100 more full time jobs. And in a town this size, that’s a pretty big deal. In fact, one of those jobs even went to Greg Langmo - he’s now Fibrominn’s “fuel” manager. Of course Fibrominn isn’t in business just to help out turkey farmers and townsfolk. It’s all about the electricity. Fibrominn has a 21 year contract to supply electricity to the power grid. The plant uses a renewable energy source that, unlike wind and solar, is always available. Terry says, “By and large, this country, this state is reliant on fossil fuels. We are a base-load facility. We can operate in theory 24 hours a day, seven days a week, producing renewable energy.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, we should tell you that turkey litter does smell when it’s burned, but because of lots of walls, doors and a serious air handling system, the only place that stinks around here is inside the Fibrominn plant. When it comes to outside the plant? Says Reed Anfinson, one man with a nose for news....“Nothing. There’s no smell with it at all.”

Well Traveled Birds
Turkey is a popular food for many people because it’s high in protein and low in fat. And while you may think about the pilgrims and Thanksgiving when it comes to turkey, it was actually the Aztecs in Mexico who first domesticated this Native American bird more than two thousand years ago.

www.bensonmn.org
www.fibrowattusa.com