Poultry droppings can develop enough gas to run a farm

At 5.30 pm every day, a conveyor belt takes away 100 tonnes of droppings from below the 1 million cackling hens at India’s largest egg-laying farm at Karlam village, an overnight bus journey from Visakhapatnam. Two hours later, the droppings from the five swanky sheds are fed into a biogas plant near by.

The litter will generate sufficient gas to produce the 1 MW of power every day needed for the fully automated temperature-controlled hen houses, besides running the tray and carton-making factories. At this unit of Radha Sakku Agro Farms, droppings have literally raised the cool quotient.

It wasn’t always so. Poultry is a smelly business. “Droppings are a headache,” says Siddharth Venkat Ram, director at Radha Sakku. Each chicken produces around 100 gm of slushy dropping everyday.

The masses of droppings attract buzzing flies that spread disease in nearby villages, often forcing the district administration to intervene. Poultry farmers usually rake the droppings into a heap and let them dry in the sun or compost it. There are few takers for the manure.

The 22-year-old first heard about poultry biogas from his grandfather P Venkat Rao, who has built the company into Asia’s largest egg producer within three decades. “When I finished my BBM course, I decided to give it a shot,” he says. Since hiring consultants was proving expensive, Ram took the DIY route.

Taking a cue from gobar gas plants, Rao replaced cow dung with poultry droppings. The droppings are put into a sealed tank called a digester, where they are heated and agitated. In the absence of oxygen, anaerobic bacteria consume the organic matter to multiply and produce gas that can fuel a generator.