Dairy farmers Cliff and Andrea Sensenig are well-aware of the struggles of dairy. When they bought Cliff Sensenig’s father’s dairy farm in 2008, they soon realized that they had to do something as a hedge against volatile dairy prices.

A few years later, they partnered with their relatives to install a co-op manure digester on their 100-cow farm in Kirkwood, Pa.

Now, six years later, the Sensenigs are getting into manure digestion again, this time on a farm they purchased last year in Maryland.

The Maryland Department of Agriculture has awarded $2 million in grants for two animal waste management projects.

The Sensenigs, who co-own Kilby Farm (John Sr., and Richard and William Kilby were 1975 Master Farmers) with Ben and Liz Flahart, plan on retrofitting an already-existing manure digester with a new engine to help convert methane from manure into electricity.

The Sensenigs and Flaharts got a $1.85 million grant from the state to perform the work. Andrea Sensenig, who helps run a farm store and ice cream shop at the Colora, Md., location, says the grant won’t cover all the work, but it was needed to get the manure digester up and running again.

IDLE DIGESTER: The $1.85 million grant will be used to purchase a new engine and retrofit other parts of the existing digester.

"We think that within a year we’ll be producing electricity to be put back on the grid," she says.

Lessons learned from first project
The Sensenigs’ first co-op digester, completed in 2012, cost $1.5 million to build and uses manure, fed from underground pipes, from cows, chickens and hogs, as well as food wastes.

Andrea Sensenig says her husband encountered several problems with the original digester, mainly the amount of sugary wastes the digester could handle at one time.

"But once you learn the feeding schedule and how the digester reacts to different food wastes, it is not too hard a thing to manage," she says. "We had a few hiccups at home that will save us some of those same hiccups at the Kilby farm."

The Kilby digester will process manure from the farm’s dairy — 500 cows — as well as food wastes from the nearby West Nottingham Academy through the school’s sustainability initiative. The farm supplies the milk for the academy’s cafeteria.

CURIOUS COW Cow: Holsteins make up the majority of the farm’s herd.

At the Kirkwood farm, they net meter all the electricity produced by the system to the grid and get paid for anything that’s not used. Sensenig says the last time they got an electricity bill at the Kirkwood farm was in 2012.

The Kirkwood farm has since been purchased by Cliff Sensenig’s brother although Cliff Sensenig still operates the digester there.

Bringing digester back to life
Andrea Sensenig says a big reason they decided to purchase the Kilby farm, about a 20-minute drive from the Kirkwood farm, was the existing digester on the property.

The farm’s herd consists of mostly Holsteins, some Jerseys and crossbreeds. About 10% of the farm’s milk is used to make ice cream sold at the nearby Kilby Cream farm store in Rising Sun. The rest, she says, is marketed through Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative.

The digester has seen better days. Sensenig says that the engine used to heat the digester and power the generator was not working and a new one will have to be put in. They are working with RCM Digesters, the same company that installed the Kirkwood digester, on the retrofit.

Sensenig says the grant won’t cover all the costs of the retrofit, but without that money it couldn’t be done.

Along with wastes from West Nottingham Academy, Sensenig says they want to take food wastes from food manufacturers and poultry processors on the Eastern Shore that would likely pay tipping fees for the wastes to be processed. 

Even in this dark time for dairy, with low milk prices forcing many farms to sell off their herds, Sensenig says the purchase of the farm and partnership with the Flaharts was a good business decision.

JOVIAL JERSEY: The farm includes some Jerseys along with cross breeds that provide the milk for the farm’s ice cream shop.

"We knew the bones were down here for a good digester system. We have the good partnership with the Flaharts. It was a good business decision," she says.

Soil blending system gets grant
Along with the Kilby farm project, the Maryland Department of Agriculture awarded a $220,000 grant for Planet Found Energy Development LLC to install a soil blending and bagging system on an existing 1,250-ton-per-year anaerobic digestion and nutrient capture system facility.

The upgrade, according to a press release, will create tailored and stabilized field amendments and potting soils derived from poultry litter.

The grants come from the department’s Animal Waste Technology Fund, which provides grants to companies that demonstrate innovative technologies on farms and alternative strategies for managing animal manure.

To date, the program has issued $5.85 million in grants, according to the Maryland Department of Agriculture.