Half-way around the world, a couple in Peru is harnessing the power of guinea pig poop, to generate methane for their farm. We couldn’t make that up if we tried.
The couple are a pair of retired plant physiology professors who have taken to running a sustainable agriculture program in their very own villa called Casa Blanca. It’s a beautiful set of gardens complete with a lab for research. But the most curious thing is the thousand guinea pigs they raise. They have a special shed for them with small compartments separated by brickwork. The guinea pigs eat specialized plant waste, and in turn, produce an astonishing 3 tonnes of fecal matter per month.
They use around 200kg of the excrement to power their very own bio-digester which in turn produces 3 cubic meters of methane per day which they use for powering their villa. The rest of it is used for fertilizer that they sell to local farms.
Now that is some serious rural ingenuity — and this is what they have to say about it:
“My message to the people of Peru is: don’t blame your poverty. Transform your poverty using affordable technologies and processes to improve your quality of life and happiness,” Ulises says, tucking into ice-cream made from fruit grown using cuy shit and frozen with cuy-shit-power.
*cuy is another word for Guinea Pig.
Our tipster was reminded of this project after reading our recent post about Washington’s new sewage power generator!
Filed under: green hacks
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