UVM students hone process to heat greenhouses with manure

By Dan D'Ambrosio, Burlington Free Press

BURLINGTON, Vt. — To the untrained eye, Tad Cooke and Eric Crockenberg’s project at the University of Vermont Horticulture Research Center off Shelburne Road looks like a 15,000-pound pile of cow manure and used straw bedding next to a greenhouse, but to the UVM seniors the pile looks like a finely tuned heat and nutrient source for the greenhouse’s verdant tomato beds. “It looks like a pile, but there are a lot of moving parts,” Cooke said. “We’re still tweaking our first live test.”

Cooke and Crockenberg, friends since childhood in Charlotte, are pursuing self-designed degrees in ecological food and energy systems in UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The piles the pair are building, based on well-established principles, exploit the heat naturally generated by decomposing farm waste, which can reach temperatures of up to 160 degrees, to heat the greenhouse. This coming winter will provide the concept a make or break test for a natural process to eliminate the need for fossil fuel to heat greenhouses.

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