How can livestock manure become clean energy? Honghua Township provides the answer
The livestock industry and new energy may seem completely unrelated, yet today, as new rural areas are being built and a circular economy is being advocated, the people of Honghua Township in Tancheng County, Shandong, are experimenting with the surprises that science and technology bring to life - turning manure from livestock farming into clean energy.
"I originally wasn't going to raise pigs anymore; courtyard farming is too dirty and pollutes the environment! Now our family has built a biogas digester, and everything is solved!" Standing in front of his newly built villa, Li Sixiang, a veteran pig farmer from Sungtang Village, said excitedly, "I plan to buy two more old sows before the wheat harvest. First, it can increase income a bit; second, the biogas produced will be plentiful, so boiling water, cooking, and lighting won't cost another cent!"
How much money does it take for a farming household to build a biogas digester? On this topic, Wen Youzhang, Party branch secretary of Huanggouya Village in the township, knows the ins and outs. He explained: because dedicated personnel handle the calculation of materials and construction in a unified way, building a biogas digester now costs only about 1,200 to 1,300 yuan. Higher authorities give a subsidy of 600 yuan to every household that applies to build biogas, and even including the purchase of biogas stoves and lamps, the household investment is less than 1,000 yuan. One-time investment brings many years of benefit, very cost-effective. Now 80 to 90 percent of farming households in their village use biogas. The spread of biogas has brought spring to rural courtyard farming. Yang Zhide, a cattle farming specialist in Sungtang Village, happily told this writer that his family now raises 6 cattle, and just from selling cattle manure to the biogas digester each year, he can increase income by more than 2,000 yuan.
At the New Rural Construction and Development Office of Honghua Township, when mentioning the relationship between the livestock industry and biogas development, Township Party Committee Secretary Zheng Guishang had a well-thought-out plan: "Promoting biogas in rural areas is exactly what makes the livestock industry, contract agriculture, and new energy truly circular. This spring we took Sungtang and Xuhaizi villages as pilot sites and launched a household biogas popularization project throughout the township, striving within three to five years to build Honghua Township into one of the circular-economy demonstration townships with the most distinctive new rural features in southern Shandong."