KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI >> Each of the 5,819 dairy cows at VDS Farms in Kalamazoo County produces 60 pounds of manure a day.

That adds up to 350,000 pounds of poop a day. And more than 60,000 tons of manure a year.

That’s why the Kalamazoo County farm is partnering with renewable natural gas company Berq, said VDS Farms Manager Sebastiaan Jooste. Berq will capture, clean and compress the waste into renewable natural gas.

Berq received a $235 million tax-exempt bond from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation in October to install anerobic digesters that turn manure into biogas at dairy farms in Hopkins, Elsie, Farwell and at VDS Farms in Kalamazoo County.

At VDS Farms, the primary product is milk. Each cow produces about 10 gallons of milk a day, Jooste said, which is used by Dairy Farmers of America in products like cheese, butter and milk across the county.

VDS operates two dairy farms in Kalamazoo County’s southeast corner — in Scotts and Fulton. The Berq digester will be built in Fulton, and waste from the Scotts facility will travel 15 miles in a truck to be added into the digester in Fulton.

The digester is expected to be operational next fall, Jooste said.

Berq could not be reached to provide more information about the cost of the four individual projects.

Installation won’t cost the farm anything — Berq will build, operate and own the digester throughout its lifetime.

That also means the farm won’t reap any financial benefits from the process, Jooste said. The farm’s Belgian owners push to keep the operation up to speed with the latest technology and environmentally-friendly methods, he said.

In the long run, an established biofuel operation could also make the farm more valuable to buyers, Jooste said. It’ll also make things a little less smelly for those that live nearby.

“We try to be really progressive dairies, and try to do the best for environment as possible,” Jooste said. “In today’s world, (farming uses) a lot of technology ... If we don’t expand (and evolve), we can’t survive.”

How does it work?

VDS cows leave their pens four times a day for milking. While they’re gone, a vacuum truck makes its way through each pen, sucking up manure along with the cow’s spoiled, sandy bedding.

Without a digester operating on the farm currently, liquid manure is separated from sand and debris and held in lagoons. The waste is injected in their surrounding corn and alfalfa fields as a fertilizer, Jooste said.

While the liquid manure sits in oxygen-starved lagoons, it decomposes and releases an odorless gas called methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — meaning it contributes more to climate change than carbon dioxide by trapping more heat in the atmosphere over a shorter period of time.

Come fall 2025, manure will be deposited in the sealed tank of an anaerobic digester instead of a lagoon, Jooste said. In a digester, Berq can trap and purify methane into a gas that will be added to a state pipeline and used to fuel trucks, buses and other vehicles powered by natural gas.

“What this company is doing is taking that methane produced in landfills (and) in feeding operations, (and it’s) containing the source to the point where you can actually collect it and and treat it,” Western Michigan University professor of organic chemistry Steve Bertman said.

Some solid waste, called digestate, will remain, Jooste said. Instead of injecting manure in its fields, VDS Farms can use this nutrient-rich mixture as fertilizer.

In Fremont, over 100 miles north, neighbors said digestate from a large-scale digester flooded their yards during heavy rain, prompting concerns over permitting and water quality. Generate Upcycle, the company that owns the Fremont Digester, denies the assertion, a spokesperson said. Though VDS’ digester will operate at a smaller scale than the Fremont digester, the digestate will have a similar makeup.

Why is Michigan interested?

Unlike coal or petroleum, methane can be replenished as quickly as it’s being used up — earning it the “renewable” title.

Trapping methane from massive livestock operations is a good thing, Bertman said, but the biogas otherwise poses similar risks as fossil fuels. When burned as fuel, the renewable natural gas releases carbon dioxide.

“Technologies that allow us to continue business as usual don’t address the core question of how we are going to live with 10 billion people on this planet in a changing climate,” Bertman said.

Rather than finding a profitable use for methane gas, the most sustainable, long-term solution to reduce the environmental impact of dairy farming would be to reduce the amount of methane entering the atmosphere, Bertman said. That means reducing the amount of manure, the number of cows and the demand for beef and dairy products.

There is a market for the natural gas, though, so the technology is expanding thanks in part to funding and tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act.

As of June 2024, there are 400 manure-based anaerobic digestion systems across the U.S. reducing methane emissions on farms with livestock, per the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Michigan, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to incentivize digesters, thus reducing the amount of methane that escapes into the atmosphere.

One state Senate bill could increase demand for the renewable natural gas by legislating lower carbon intensity in fuels, while a bill package from the House seeks to make it easier for digesters to operate by exempting them from groundwater permitting and allowing the solid byproduct to be spread as fertilizer.

At the same time the MEDC approved funding for Berq, it approved a $100 million tax-exempt bond for a Chevron and Brightmark project to bring digesters to dairy farms in Greenville, Hartford, Morenci, Orleans and Coopersville.

In Michigan, VDS is considered a large dairy farm, Jooste said. Its nearly 6,000 cows make up less than 1% of the state’s 430,000 dairy cows, which add up to 19.8 million pounds of wet manure per day.

If all that manure were treated by digesters and turned into biogas, it could produce about 300 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, Michigan State University Professor Wei Liao said.

The value of a digester is its ability to offset carbon emissions, Bertman said. But even at a statewide scale, digesters could only offset about 2% of Michigan’s power industry output.

As both a resident and a scientist, the numbers leave Bertman with mixed feelings about the project and its impact on Kalamazoo County.

“If we offset some fossil natural gas through this process, that is a potentially positive thing ... but it also it empowers the status quo,” Bertman said. “(That doesn’t ease) my concern about the urgency with which we need to be moving away from fossil fuels.”