Food Farming Fuel

Farmers are fighting high fuel and energy costs on the farm. Here is one Ohio farmers solution.

Dull has since become an Ohio pioneer in green farming and renewable energy, and his efforts have garnered the attention of Ohio legislators, who turn to him for creative ideas on agriculture’s role in environmental protection.

“He is demonstrating through his farming practices that you can have a profitable farming operation while caring for the earth,” says Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who wants the state to rely more on alternative energy and is pushing a stimulus package that would earmark $150 million for advanced energy sources such as solar power, wind, and clean coal.

There are six wind generators on Dull’s 2,800-acre farm in western Ohio. In one building sits a machine that produces hydrogen made from electricity and water. Dull hopes it will soon replace the gas in his forklifts and supplant the propane that heats his pig barn. Dull’s office is geothermally heated and cooled. He dries his seed corn by burning rejected corn instead of propane, and he grinds corn cobs to sell as horse bedding and mulch.

It is even cost effective.

Dull spent $210,000 on his 120-foot-high windmills, 25 percent of which was bankrolled by a state grant. The windmills account for about 15 percent of the $40,000 worth of electricity required to run the farm each year. Dull spent about $100,000 on his corn-drying furnace; at current propane prices, it has saved him about $150,000.