Listen to the podcast.

Pigs to Power

If renewable energy is the wave of the future, German farmer Heiner Gartner is one gnarly, surfin’ dude.

The former pig farmer decided three years ago that if his family was going to make any kind of living, it wasn’t going to be through traditional farming methods. So he transformed his sunny acreage in Bavaria into a small-scale solar power plant. Not only did it save his family from ruin, it’s helping to fuel cleaner energy for his entire village.

Gartner is aided by the fact that his farm gets more than its fair share of sunshine and by a law passed two years ago that guarantees him a minimum price for each kilowatt of electricity he produces, well above market value.

The wheat fields weren’t the only things he converted, either. He still has the pigs, but now he uses them to produce waste that he converts into biogas, another source of electricity.

So far his venture has been an all-around success, which is a major relief for Gartner, who literally bet the farm on it.

To read more about this story, read the article in the New York Times.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org