Family Farm Turns State Fair Butter Art Into Green Energy

PAVILION, N.Y. — As the days grow shorter and autumn advances toward winter, it’s inevitable to look back at the previous summer and remember the good times enjoyed with family and friends.

For many, those good times involve hours spent at a state fair, where almost inevitably the center of attention is some kind of outsized butter sculpture.

It’s a tradition that many believe dates back to 1903, when employees of A.T. Shelton & Company, distributors of Sunbury Co-Operative Creamery butter, sculpted the very first butter cow for the Ohio State Fair.

Such was the ensuing sensation that other fairs soon had their own butter cows, and soon after that, some fairs began adding new wrinkles, like moving on from cows and decreeing that each year’s sculpture should be created around a new annual theme.

The question of course, as one looks back on the fair experience, is just what happens to that 900 – 2,000-pound dairy creation when the fair shuts down and the attendees and volunteers and staff all melt away to their homes?

In New York State, where this year’s sculpture theme was “Dairy Every Day is a Healthy Way – Keeping Kids’ Health on Track,” the answer is the butter is hauled away and eventually put to the task of churning out electricity.

The man behind it all is Chris Noble of Noblehurst Farms in Pavilion, New York, who has undertaken the effort in partnership with the American Dairy Association North East, the group that sponsors the annual sculpture.

For the past nine years, Noble has been showing up at the end of the fair, loading the disassembled art on the back of his truck and taking it home to feed his farm’s anaerobic digester.

Once there, the butter — which, incidentally, is inedible and not fit for retail sale for a variety of reasons — is mixed with cow manure and food waste, including donations from local supermarkets and restaurants.

Microbes in the anaerobic tank eat the mixture and generate methane gas, which is run through an internal combustion engine to generate electricity.

That electricity is then sent back to the electrical grid, providing enough watts to run the farm’s operations and power more than 500 homes.

Recently, The Well News caught up with Noble, with an assist from the American Dairy Association North East’s Greg Szklany, to find out more about life on the 3,500-acre, multi-family farm in Western New York state and the roles sustainability and renewable energy play there.

Agriculture has been the mainstay at Noblehurst Farms for seven generations, with two families, the Nobles and the Klappers, accounting for most of the activity on the land for the majority of that time. Today, roughly 2,000 cows are milked on the site.

“A few core values to Noblehurst are being stewards to our land and animals, taking care of our natural resources, and being diverse and innovative,” Chris Noble said in an email to The Well News.

“In 2000, we became interested in anaerobic digestion, seeing it as a way for us to give back to our environment as well as diversify our operation,” he said.

Soon construction of a digester was underway, and a larger model followed in 2014.

“That’s the digester we’re using today,” Noble said.

Initially, the idea was simply to recycle “material” readily available on the farm.

“If there is one thing dairy farmers are not short of it is manure and being able to use manure to create energy is a win for agriculture,” Noble explained.

But as the farmer’s experience with anaerobic digestion grew, he recognized it had a broader utility he had yet to tap.

“It was during the construction of the new digester that we saw a major void in the marketplace for wasted food, and this inspired us to create the ability to add food waste to our digester in addition to our cows’ manure. 

“This gave us the ability to divert food waste from landfills and be used to create renewable electricity,” Noble added. 

It should be stated here that Noblehurst was no stranger to renewable energy when it began this endeavor as solar panels have been installed on some of its barns for years. However, anaerobic digestion proved to have multiple benefits.

In addition to producing energy from waste, it also helps the farmers decrease the carbon footprint of their operations.

“Anaerobic digestion is a win for agriculture operations like ours … because we’re able to use our cow’s manure as well as food waste and power our farm,” Noble said. “We easily meet our yearly needs with the electricity we are producing, and what’s left over, in terms of excess energy produced, is sold off to the grid.”

Success in recycling did not come cheap. Noblehurst farms spent roughly $3.5 million in 2014 to build its current digester, an amount, Noble admitted, that “was a large investment for us.”

“Digesters have been big in Europe for many years now, so we had two engineers from Germany come out to assist with the project as well as a company called EnviTech Biogas and the Martin Energy Group,” he said. 

“Fortunately, there were some federal, state and local grants available to assist in the cost,” Noble said.

 As for the butter sculpture, Noble described its “deconstruction” as a collaborative effort with the American Dairy Association North East and volunteers from the Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners. 

“The deconstruction process takes place the day after the fair closes — so annually, that is the day after Labor Day,” Noble said. “It takes a crew anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes to physically scrape the approximately 800 pounds of butter from the armature of the sculpture, which depending on the design, is composed of wire and/or wood.”

The butter is then transferred to large plastic bags and loaded onto Noble’s pickup.

“Once the butter reaches the farm it is taken out of the bags it was put in, and placed on a conveyor belt, where it is mixed with other food waste,” he said.

“This might include bananas, lettuce, Coca-Cola syrup, Snapple — whatever biodegradable material has made its way into the waste stream at any given time, from places like Wegmans supermarkets, Whole Foods, Amazon, and local universities,” he continued.

Remarkably, Noble estimated the farm collects about 200 tons of food waste a week from such sources, putting it to use in the name of sustainability rather than having it wind up in a landfill.

“Once we collect it on site, it goes into a vat container, where it is mixed with cow manure,” he said.

The next step is loading the material into the digester, where, over a 28-day period, it will decompose and create methane, which in turn is used to create electricity.

“Based on our calculations the 800 pounds of butter used in a single sculpture produces enough energy to power one home for three days,” Noble said.

When it is suggested the whole thing amounts to a great story about sustainability, the farmer readily agrees.

“What’s great about this journey is that it starts with the American Dairy Association North East, which is able to take this butter … and work with sculptors to make a beautiful piece of art, which then goes on display for hundreds of thousands to enjoy.

“Then, by our farm recycling the butter to create renewable energy, we are helping to keep something out of a landfill, with nothing wasted along the way,” Noble said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue