This tractor runs on cow manure
Trenance Farm sits at the extreme southwest spit of England, six hours from London and a kicked clod from the Celtic Sea. It’s a dairy farm whose owners, Kevin and Kate Hoare, still milk their cows by hand — 120 bovines, twice a day. But the Hoares are also working with some of the most vanguard climate technology on the planet.
The Trenance Farm is one of the first places in the world where one can find a tractor that runs exclusively on methane, the completely natural and highly polluting byproduct of pretty much any organic decomposition.
The machine — dubbed the New Holland T6 — weighs 21,000 pounds, boasts 180 horsepower and has as much oomph as a diesel tractor. But its 49-gallon tank spews 62% less nitrous oxide and up to 15% less carbon dioxide, all while running indefinitely on the manure of roughly 75 cows.
“It takes 10 minutes to refuel and we never run out of gas,” Kevin Hoare says. “We might only be a small fish, but at least we’re doing our bit.”
For all its greenery, agriculture is an insidious gusher of greenhouse gas: Heavy-duty equipment emits nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, while much of everything else on a farm — the flora and fauna being raised — spews a continuous cloud of methane, a gas that breaks down naturally over a decade but in the meantime contributes to global warming at a rate 80 times that of carbon. While electrification is increasingly addressing emissions from cars and trucks, it’s less of a fit for farm machinery, because the requisite long hours and intense labor grind batteries down quickly.
That mismatch is what spurred CNH Industrial, an Italy-based rival to
John Deere, to start exploring alternative fuels almost 20 years ago. The company latched onto methane because the gas is not only an agent of climate chaos, but on a farm it’s everywhere. Methane accounts for about 20% of greenhousegas emissions.
“Electrification has a role … but it’s not likely to replace diesel,” says CNH Chief Executive Officer Scott Wine.
“But a medium-sized farm is going to produce more methane than it can use.”
A CNH start-up called Bennamann makes synthetic fabric domes, or membranes, that stretch over manure lagoons and capture wafting gas like a tented parachute in gym class.
One dome can store a month’s worth of gas, which can be processed into fuel in about four days.
The Trenance Farm is burning about 100 fewer gallons of diesel each month, the equivalent in carbon emissions of what a car spews every three months. It’s also tenting so much methane that the Hoares started using the excess gas to power a generator, which in turn churns out enough electricity to juice the entire farm.