The fluctuating cost of fuel is one of the unpredictable elements farmers face in trying to stay afloat.
A small group of organic farmers in southwest Wisconsin are trying to take control, by producing their own fuel to run their tractors.
WUWM Environmental Reporter Susan Bence visited people in Gays Mills trying to perfect the art of fuel production.
High above the Kickapoo River, It feels like you’re standing on the edge of the sky on the Wedeberg family farm.
Your gaze moves to a cluster of cows grazing on the slope below, but Jake Wedeberg’s eyes are riveted on his sunflower seeds being fed into an elegant humming contraption. They’re on their way to becoming biodiesel fuel.
“We first started the project, we wanted to press oil on farm, but then we wanted to make it make, so we could take it from farm to farm, so then it kind of developed and evolved,” Wedeberg says.
Wedeberg and colleague Zach Biermann starting working on the idea a couple of years ago.
“We spent about a year researching equipment and traveling across the country and talking to farmers that were crushing oilseeds already,” Biermann says.
Biermann came up with a plan and a machine shop in LaCrosse custom-built the unit sitting inside this 26- foot-long trailer. Biermann fondly calls it the press trailer.
“The short version of what goes on in here is we have a hole in the ceiling. The seed gets augured into that bin and that holds about a whole days worth of seed, and there’s an automated eye,” Biermann says.
That synchronizes the smooth feed of seeds into the system.
“And this is a stainless steel Kernkraft cold-screw press,” Biermann says.
That’s a very fancy press that ensures the oil won’t overheat.
“And we don’t chemically extract the oil from the seed which a lot of people do,” Biermann says.
The seeds move through the press and the freshly-squeezed sunflower oil drips down into a large vat where it will settle before potassium hydroxide and methanol are added. They set off the chemical reaction that produces biodiesel, and a clean biodiesel, that does not gum up fuel filters.
What remains is meal, that is chopped and creates a mass of inch-long pellets. Wedeberg’s cows will enjoy the protein-rich stuff.
Zach Biermann admits it’s taken a while to work out the kinks.
“Right here, what you see here, this has been many days and hours,” Biermann says.
The press creation came with a $50,000 price tag, not including maintenance costs. Still, Wedeberg says it doesn’t cost much to run it.
“The press costs about $3.80 a day to run and we get about 100 gallons of oil per day out of that,” Wedeberg says.
Zach Biermann has high hopes for the model. He says groups of farmers could form their own fuel coops.
“So like five farmers could share one of these and have it maybe in a central location so they wouldn’t have to make it mobile. Like Jake said, this is capable of doing 100 gallons per day or an acre a day, so if you grew 20 acres of an oilseed crop, the potential is there to grow 2,000 gallons of fuel. So most farms like this one we’re on today, uses about how many,” Biermann says.
“Two thousand gallons of fuel,” Wedeberg says.
Wedeberg says that’s what it takes to run his family’s tractors and other farm equipment for one year. The 24 year old figures he can produce more than 70 percent of that fuel, as well as half the meal the Wedeberg cows eat.
And he expects the system will be fairly self-sufficient, so when it’s humming, farmers won’t have to divert a lot of manpower away from regular chores.
Wedeberg says five more farmers have signed on, so next week, the pair will take their press trailer on the road. “Harvesting oilseed crops and working on the economics and see how this model works,” Wedeberg says.
Interest in the pilot has spread beyond this cluster of organic farmers.
Chuck Steiner wants to see how the program works. He teaches agribusiness at UW-Platteville.
“If the economic analysis shows that this is feasible, and that there is the potential to make this profitable for the producer, then we could actually replicate this in conventional farming as well, I mean this would be another option for soybean farmers to basically use their own production as a means to generating biodiesel to use on their farm,” Steiner says.
This winter, Steiner and his students are going to scrutinize the economics of the pilot. By next spring, he expects to have useful information.
In the meantime, Jake Wedeberg says it’s full steam ahead at press trailer central.
“That’s one thing, you work on this stuff and you’re covered in oil by the end of the day,” Wedeberg says.
He seems to think the experiment is worth the mess.
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