Theresa Levine from The Farmer’s Log on Manure Management

GN: Good afternoon, everyone. It’s Steve Melito from Go Natural Education and today we are here with Theresa Levine from The Farmer’s Log, a company that’s offering farmers a way to reduce their manure storage volume while creating nutrient-rich fertilizers and pathogen-free animal bedding. Farmers can earn more from their manure and everyone else benefits, too, as we’ll find out.

Theresa Levine welcome to the podcast.

TL: Thanks so much, Steve. Glad to be here.

GN: Well, it’s great to have you with us and I can’t help but notice that you’re not in a stall or a stable or a field. You’re in a law office. How did you get to go from the legal profession to farming, or maybe it was the other way around?

TL: The inventor of the equipment that’s being developed by The Farmer’s Log actually came across me in a professional setting and I told him I wasn’t going to represent the company, and he kept after me for several months and convinced me to join the board as CEO. So, it’s been a really interesting experience because I haven’t had much to do with 1:18 manufacturing and farming aside from in my own family. My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was one of the Oneida Dairy inspectors for many many years and retired from that area.

GN: Wow. That’s great. So then, you’re like me. I have a history degree – actually a couple of them – and I have learned about manufacturing and farming as I’ve gone along. So your website at farmerslog.us asks a question: why manure management? I think it’s a great question because before we talk about solutions, what’s the problem or the problems that we’re trying to solve with manure exactly?

TL: So manure is a shitty problem and somebody’s got to deal with it. We’ve got no shortage of poop jokes but we take it really seriously because manure is one of the main methane producers that is kind of low-hanging fruit for us to tackle and given the political climate that we’re in where there are big incentives for carbon credits and other types of implementation of processes and systems, it’s a great time for farmers to be implementing some different manure management strategies.

I know a lot of farms use anaerobic digestion and our equipment would actually make that a more effective process because the manure would go through that anaerobic digestion and be able to have part used for energy generation through that digester and have that anaerobic activity stopped and neutralized to be able to then separate the solids from the liquids, which is one of the best ways of making manure management more efficient.

GN: Got it. So tell us about the technology. There was a term used. It sounds like a bit of chemistry: pyrolysis. I’m probably getting it wrong but how does it all work?

TL:  Sure, so let’s start at the beginning. We make primarily make a mobile unit that can travel around to farms so that this isn’t a cost that one farmer needs to be burdened with. It can be shared by a number of local farms and we can in a very short time, about 15 minutes for a full tanker truck of manure, we can get the solid separated from the tea water and with those solids, we’re able to dry those through a proprietary process, and those can be used as animal bedding that will help create a further nutrient enriched solid to run through again the next time that we process for the farm, but the real advantage to our system happens really with this tea water mix that gets squeezed out of the manure so with 5hydrostatic pressure and some pre-processing of biochar we’re able to capture the NPK – it’s nitrogen phosphorus and potassium – and really allow farmers to create their own myths based on the props that they need of essentially a fertilizer – a naturally-sourced and non-chemical based fertilizer.

GN: Wow. So you could tailor this to corn versus soybeans versus wheat.

TL: So different crops have different demands. You’re only as good as the nutrient you’re nutrient that you’re missing, so with this you can actually tailor with different content of biochar and with pyroligneous acid, which is also known as wood vinegar. We can tailor a mix that will get the right nutrients out for whatever crops a farmer has.

Some farms that we work with are actually looking at having us take the tea water fertilizer mixture and resell that to other, more crop-producing farms because my experience has been that we’re working predominantly with dairies up in Upstate New York currently and my experience is that they only grow enough to kind of supplement what they’re purchasing for their main cow feed and don’t have enough land to spread their manure, so our product allows them to very quickly handle the massive amounts of manure that farmers spend multiple hours managing every day and then take that and bring it to another market so that it the cost of our equipment gets further subsidized. The farmers get an addition of time and finances into their tills because they don’t have to spend as much on fertilizers.

GN: Right. I was going to ask you about that. It’s my understanding that the price of fertilizer chemical fertilizers has gone up considerably so it sounds like what you have as a solution that helps the farmer’s bottom line.

TL: It absolutely helps the farmer’s bottom line in not only that way but also in terms of potentially opening up the opportunity for partnerships to obtain carbon credits. So you asked me a bit earlier about pyrolysis, a fancy name for burning stuff in a chamber that has no air in it. So in this pyrolysis process, we can take any kind of biomatter, bio waste material and basically turn it back into carbon to simplify this and when we turn a biomaterial into carbon, it gives us an opportunity to permanently sequester that carbon and it stops methane from being produced it absorbs it so there’s a reduction in odors and effluent coming off the farm. It’s also by including this biochar and spraying this mixture on the farmer’s fields, it actually amends the soil and makes the soil able to hold more groundwater – I’m sorry, not hold more groundwater, but not have runoff from rains, which is a huge concern up here near the Finger Lakes where we have algae blooms being caused by the chemical fertilizers.

GN: Right. Which, of course, is very negative for the fish population and other aquatic life.

TL: Absolutely. So working with a system essentially can be a life cycle of the manure that ends in sequestering carbon and capturing the methane from the manure. That’s I think one of our biggest environmental assets because, essentially, we can turn a farm into a carbon-negative prospect.

GN: That’s incredible. Would you be so kind as to explain how the carbon sequestering market works? I haven’t read anything really that gives me a clear description. Are you learning as well?

TL: This is an evolving area and as a person doing double duty as a lawyer and as a CEO of a startup I want to be careful answering. Because my understanding of carbon credits right now is that those credits are only for the person making the biochar. We work with Seneca Farms Biochar and they are our pyrolysis folks. They are experts in that. So we bring them organic materials, bio waste, and they turn it into the carbon.

GN: So let’s talk about those bio waste  materials now Upstate New York where you’re located. In general, there’s an emphasis on hemp production and cannabis production, and there’s plenty of corn fields. Is all that waste something you could use in this process?

TL: Yes. We have a parent company called Aggie Gen and the parent company is kind of working through three different organizations that are wholly owned subsidiaries. So, The Farmer’s Log is essentially the equipment processing. We take in materials that are biological wastes. We’re focused primarily on helping dairy farmers handle their manure, but this same mechanical system is something that we can use to recycle food wastes and the really awful fibrous wastes coming out of the hemp and cannabis industries. That’s something that my background in law has been kind of fortuitous because right now New York is still figuring out the legislation on how to allow folks who are growing to get rid of those stocks because it’s a big problem. There’s currently farms that I’ve been working with who have warehouses full of just old stocks from prior years’ growth and there’s only so much composting you can do.

GN: And all those old dry stocks are certainly a fire hazard.

TL: They are. And it’s our mobile process being able to bring that to the farm and being able safely and in a contained area handle some of those other kinds of unique biowastes that makes the whole process much safer than I’ve seen it done elsewhere because you’re not exposed to any of the cellulose that can float around in the air and damage your lungs. Through this mobile process, we’re able to handle any kind of biological. We’ve done some food waste material from New York City. We processed a whole bunch of rotten tofu and vegetables and that turned almost immediately into a very soil-like component without any other treatment, and as we’re mixing in biochar and the pyroligneous acid wood vinegar into these materials depending on different farmers’ needs, we’re able to make any number of products from them.

The Farmer’s Log name kind of came out of a joke but what we’re able to do is create a solid brick that used to be cow manure and it has no odor, and you’re able to burn it and it burns quite a lot hotter and quite a lot longer than wood and in the meantime you’re helping kind of keep the environment going by sequestering the methane into the biochar and kind of helping things along that way.

GN: So this is a great technology. Theresa, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about the farmer’s log and I’m going to give that website one more time. It’s famerslog.us and if you’d like, go and check out the website.

TL: I’d also welcome people to contact me at The Farmer’s Log and at Aggie Gen Corporate at 607-296-0767.

GN: Excellent. Fantastic. Theresa, thank you.

TL: Thank you, Steve.