As I mentioned in my last post, the only major items left to purchase for Pony Tail Acres were a tractor and a farm. Well, we decided that we wanted to meet our goal of buying all of the vehicles and equipment we needed in 2009, so that we could leave just finding a farm for our major 2010 purchase. We’ve traded our personal vehicles for farm trucks. We bought the horse trailer and various tools. And the biggest tool yet we gave ourselves for Christmas while Kubota was still offering 0 percent financing – a Kubota Grand L 3240 tractor (that we’ll be running on biodiesel). We also picked up a bush hog and tiller attachment so as to make our gardening efforts and cleanup for whatever farm we purchase much more do-able.

Speaking of finding a farm, we think we’ve finally found one! We’re very close to making an offer on a 38 acre tract that we found that we believe should go for somewhere under $10,000 an acre. Since some of you have asked for ways to help, we’ve also created a donations page where you can help push the organic and sustainable farming movement to more peoples’ dinner tables.

http://www.ponytailacres.org/donate.php

Ashley (left) and Brandy (right) on the Kubota

The barrels are in place. The manure, sawdust, straw, leaves and food waste is piled up. The barrels are full of water with 200 feet of water hose submerged in them. The basic system is set up and in place! So here’s a few numbers for where we’re at:

Water coming out of the hose was 60 degrees on the dot. By the time I finished filling the two barrels, the water at the top of each barrel was 60.7 degrees. We left to go to lunch with Ashley’s sister, Brandy, and their dad. After we got back home and settled in, I finally went back out to check on their status – about 3 hours after the initial temperature readings. The barrel on the right had risen to 60.9 degrees and the barrel on the left had risen to 61.2 degrees. And that’s with compost only about half way up the barrels. So I piled up some compost around some empty spots by the barrels and made sure to cover as much as I could without working too hard. (After all, I just had a root canal re-done on an infected tooth yesterday morning… I’m not really able to do too much at the moment.)

While I was piling up the compost around the barrels, I got out the thermometer and measured some of the internal spots in the compost pile. I was pleasantly surprised to see that some spots in the pile are already up to 117 degrees, even with outdoor temps at only 52 degrees. I’m anxious to get some insulation around the pile to keep the heat from escaping so easily and make the water heating time that much quicker. But even 117 degrees is plenty hot enough to mix with some cold water to wash horses in the winter.

Did you know that the sun is hot? Indeed it is! But what about those cold winter days when the temps drop to below 30? Is the sun still hot? Yes! So if there was a way to capture the heat from the sun and not have to use fossil fuels or electricity from the grid (coal mostly in this area), wouldn’t it be a fantastic idea to do that? Well, I’ve found some designs online that do just that. We’re currently working on building a version of one of them to install on the basement of the house. Hopefully within the next few weeks we’ll be able to post here some preliminary results!

For those of you who follow me (David) on Facebook, you might also know that I’m working on a compost based water heater. You see, as a small horse facility, our horses produce manure. That manure has to get cleaned out of their stalls from the small amount of time that they spend in there. However, what many people see as waste, we see as opportunity. Did you know that in just a 500 pound mound of compost – manure, leaves, grass clippings, table scraps, etc. – there are over 4,000,000 BTUs of energy?

So how do we get that energy into a usable form? Well, with the right carbon to nitrogen mixture (different materials are high in carbon while others are high in nitrogen) and some water, compost piles can heat up to 170 degrees in the middle. The average home water heater is set somewhere between 115 and 140 degrees and the average hot shower is 107 degrees.

So what if we took this heat and extracted it somehow? Well, that’s exactly what we’re working on doing. After quite a bit of research, I’m working on building a prototype of the system to heat up around 110 gallons of water to act as a heat exchanger. At first we’ll primarily be providing hot water for the wash racks for the barn. Since it appears that we’ll have plenty of excess heat available to us, we might run a couple of hoses in a loop to the house and back with a radiator to let that heat migrate into the house for when the sun isn’t heating up our solar heater.

So stay tuned. I’ll get some pictures up here in the next week or so as our eco friendly projects progress.