Yeah, yeah, we can see your eyes rolling! You’ve heard it all before! The anaerobic digester on Barstow’s Longview Farm creates green electricity for 250 homes, yawn. It sources free heat to the dairy barns and local homes, cool, whatever. And yes, you know that the farm uses the fluid feedstock from the digester as … Read more
By Jacob Axelrad, The Christian Monitor November 19, 2014 BOSTON — On a Monday morning in the Boston University food court, students toss plates of food in bins with multicolored labels: green for recycling, black for landfill, and yellow for compostables. “We capture as much food waste and organic material as we can,” says Sabrina … Read more
Cabot Creamery Cooperative November, 2014 What is your favorite thing about being a dairy farm family? I think the best part about being a dairy farm family is that we aren’t just a family we’re a team. House after house in our small rural neighborhood is a Barstow home and you can always count on … Read more
MassLive by Mary Serreze, Special to The Republican October 3, 2014 Massachusetts officials brought their “Food Waste Ban Full Harvest Tour” to Hadley on Friday with a visit to Barstow’s Longview Farm, the site of an innovative waste-to-energy project. The farm’s anaerobic digester takes manure and food waste and converts it into methane gas, which … Read more
By Corinna Clendenen, Civil Eats August 25, 2014 How much would you pay to convert manure to electricity? What if you could power your home and workplace, make fertilizer, keep organic waste out of the landfill, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and sell excess energy to the local grid? To transform guilt into virtue, is $3.1 … Read more
Cabot Creamery Cooperative Cow Poop & Food Scraps…Organic Materials In, Electricity Out Barstow’s Longview Farm has a herd of 450 animals. 250 are milking cows and the remaining are young replacement stock and steers. The barn housing the milk cows has pipes hooked up to the anaerobic digester. This manure, with the help of gravity and pumps, is … Read more
NPR’s “The Salt”, by Katherine Perry August 6, 2014 Sure, there’s plenty you can do with leftovers: foist them on your office mates or turn them into casserole. But if you’re a big food waste generator like a hospital or a supermarket, your scraps usually go to the landfill to rot. In Massachusetts, that’s about … Read more
Country Folks Magazine, by Laura Rodley Cows have always been considered unusual due to their unique style of digestion: their stomach has four chambers. Now Barstow’s Longview Farm in Hadley, MA will be known for having a unique stomach of its own — a BGreen Energy’s Anaerobic Digester that converts manure and food scraps into … Read more
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center June 20, 2014 More than 200 years ago, the Barstow family built a dairy farm on a plot of land in Hadley. Earlier this month, the family celebrated another milestone on their sixth-generation farm – the start-up of their new anaerobic digester. I was excited to travel to Hadley with MassCEC … Read more
By Nora Goldstein, BioCycle June 2014, Vol. 55, No. 5, p. 58 A steady stream of anaerobic digestion facilities are coming on line, most equipped to process food waste. This first of a two-part series profiles several farm digesters. In the past several weeks, we received invitations to two ribbon cuttings for newly installed farm-based … Read more