Shelburn Farms in Vermont has started turning waste hay into pellets to produce heat by burning them in a furnace.
http://www.forbes.com/...
As reported by the Associate Press:
It cost Shelburne Farms about $1,000 a year to mow grass that doesn't end up as hay for the animals and simply goes to waste. Now staff at the historic farm have come up with a use for it: turn it to pellets and burn them to heat the massive main barn.
A boiler room is a strange place for a party, but the only things missing Friday were cocktails and canapes as staff from the farm, a historic landmark and environmental education center, joined representatives of the Grass Energy Collaborative and others to watch grass pellets get loaded into the barn's furnace.
Grass as fuel is not new. Burning it got Great Plains pioneers through many a tough winter in the 19th century. What is relatively new is the idea that grass pellets could be manufactured for maximum heating efficiency and sold commercially.
While the cost differential is pretty startling, $10.20 per million BTU from grass vs. $23.47 from oil, what I find more intriguing is the prospect of promoting the preservation of our grasslands. Although most people have come to appreciate that forests are an important asset in the global environment, grassland habitats are just as or even more important, not only for a diverse fauna, but to retard the erosion of our landmass.
Trees, it turns out, aren't all that good at keeping productive soils from being washed into the sea during heavy rain events. Grasses not only do a better job of retaining the soils created by microbes and the activities of small critters, but because being grazed causes them to become more dense and more firmly rooted, mowing the tops and turning them into hay, is simply the mechanization of a necessary natural process.
On the other hand, if pastures lie fallow, either because domestic or wild herds are no longer grazing, then they revert to scrub and eventually marginally productive forests which can't support the fauna that thrive on so-called "edge" environments. Even deer, for example, seem to require whatever they get from the wild strawberries that grow hidden in a natural pasture, not to mention other fruiting trees that thrive in the partial shade of the forest's edge.
So, it would seem that harvesting marginal hay for fuel pellets is a true win-win proposition.