Energy a theme at annual ag tour

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August 19, 2008

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Tue Aug 19, 2008, 09:49 PM CDT

By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

DIAMOND, Mo. — Plato would have been proud of the Youngbloods.

More than 2,300 years after the philosopher termed necessity the “mother of invention,” brothers Bruce and Doug Youngblood showed just what necessity could do when poultry farmers were faced with steep energy costs.

Saddled with rising heating bills for six poultry houses on the family farm just south of Diamond, the Youngbloods in 2003 decided to create their own heat source: a giant stove that burns fescue straw and even corn stubble to generate heat and can be used as a supplement to conventional heating systems.

“We decided there had to be a better way,” Bruce Youngblood said of the stove’s conception.

The two brothers were showered with questions about that stove on Tuesday as energy savings emerged as a key topic during U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt’s annual Southwest Missouri Agriculture Tour. The Youngblood farm was one of more than a dozen visited this week by Blunt and a contingent of state and federal agricultural officials, students, and representatives of other agricultural groups. The tour is designed to showcase innovation employed in Southwest Missouri agriculture.

Bruce Youngblood said his family’s innovation was a journey through “a lot of trial and error,” but that the work has been well worth it.

He estimated that a farm similar in size to the one operated by his family could see gas bills for heating poultry houses run between $50,000 and $60,000 a year.

Last year, with the use of the stove, the family paid about $14,500 in gas bills, he said.

The stove the family built cost more than $67,000, plus an additional $7,000 to $10,000 per chicken house.

But Bruce Youngblood said those start-up costs and the cost of the straw are more than offset by the tens of thousands of dollars the family saves on heating bills.

The Youngbloods have built several similar stoves for sale to other farmers seeking relief from mounting heating prices, he said.

The Youngbloods were not the only ones who talked Tuesday about ways to save money amid rising energy costs.

Rusty Boucher, owner of Boucher’s Plant Farm in Monett, told tour visitors that his operation will expand over the next year so it can grow lettuce and tomatoes in addition to strawberries. The Plant Farm is a full-service greenhouse that offers floral and landscaping services, and grows its vegetables through hydroponics, which grows the produce in mineral-nutrient solutions instead of soil.

Boucher said heating bills for the farm’s greenhouses are the chief expenditure. One of the reasons the operation is adding lettuce, he said, is because it is a high-demand item that can grow in lower temperatures.

“That is a huge savings in natural gas,” Boucher told the Globe in a phone interview.

Agricultural efficiency also was cited during an overview of some of the federally funded research under way at another tour stop, the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Missouri’s Southwest Research Center near Mount Vernon.

Monty Kerley, a professor of animal sciences with the University of Missouri, on Tuesday told members of the tour that the center has been studying feed efficiency among a herd of beef cattle. A more feed-efficient cow will require less feed than another but still gain weight, resulting in lower feed costs and in less waste. Ranchers could in turn breed those more feed-efficient cattle.

Research at the center, for example, found that the most feed-efficient cow last year ate about $120 less in feed than the least efficient.

At a time when farmers and ranchers face increasing costs for feed, land and fuel, those savings can be important, Kerley said.

“Efficiency is a fairly timely topic,” he said.

How does it work?

The stove devised by the Youngblood family is designed to heat with any dry bio-mass bale, including baled cornstalks, fescue stubble, straw and hay.