Parshottambhai Shanabhai Patel, 65, says the biggest favour the people of his village did for him “was saying they would no longer put up with the stink from my cowshed at the entrance of the village.”
Reluctantly in 1994, Patel shifted his eight animals to his three-hectare farm three kilometres away from his village in Gujarat State’s Anand district. The district is where Indian dairy cooperative AMUL started the country’s “white revolution,” a hugely successful grassroots movement that has helped turn India into the world’s largest milk producer, with 2.5 million litres of milk collected daily from over 1,176 village cooperatives.
Now Patel’s contentious cow dung could spark a revolution of a different kind.
After a decade of practicing organic farming, thanks to training provided by the Gujarat government-run Navsari Agricultural University, Patel decided in 2009 to push his farm even further into the green by building his own biogas plant.
With technical guidance from the university, he constructed a six cubic-metre brick-and-mortar underground plant near his cowshed and connected it to his existing 12 horsepower irrigation pump. By turning the gases emitted by cow dung slurry into a clean, renewable fuel that Patel uses to run his irrigation system, the plant saves him money, increases his productivity and boosts his profits.
Experts say biogas plants like Patel’s are easy to build, operate and maintain. And in a country dealing with changing rainfall patterns, and where only 35 percent of agricultural land is irrigated, they could transform the lives of India’s small farmers.
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