In the heart of North Carolina’s bucolic wine country, east of the Great Smoky Mountains, lies Loyd Ray Farms — a factory farm that turns pig poop into energy.
From the road, the sprawling site looks like a typical concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, with nine elongated metal barns housing nearly 9,000 hogs and an open lagoon that stores liquefied manure. But next to the lagoon is a bizarre basin covered by an inflated tarp: the biodigester. Every week, this swollen structure turns 400,000 gallons of liquid hog waste into biogas that fuels the farm.
Loyd Ray Farms is the first to tap a new energy market created under North Carolina’s unique renewable energy law, which took effect in 2012. Whereas many states have renewable energy laws requiring utility companies to harvest a percentage of their energy from solar or wind power, North Carolina is the only one requiring power derived from hog or chicken manure. Loyd Ray Farms has been turning its animal waste into biogas since 2011. The fuel generates renewable energy and allows the owner to sell carbon offset credits. After this successful pilot project, which attracted investments from a regional power company and Google, researchers are now looking to help other farms follow suit and expand the market for waste-to-energy systems on a national scale.
