When Bob and I found ourselves headed to a family gathering in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we reached out to our friends Matt and Jenn and they invited us to spend the night.
Matt and Jenn live out in the country, not far from their day jobs at Dickinson College Farm. Matt usually gives us a farm tour while Jenn finishes up her work, then we all have dinner. This time, we spent the night. The next morning, Jenn took me and Pepe for a walk, a couple of country miles, the rural version of a walk around the block.
When we got back to the house, Matt said that he and Bob had watched us walking on the other side of the big field while they drank their coffe and that Bob had said Jenn and I looked like we were riding bicycles. I pressed Bob for an explanation and he said it was because of fast we were traveling and because our heads were not bobbing up and down. I blushed, thinking, “That’s us, fast and smooth.”
Jenn served me a cup of Dandy Blend, a great coffee alternative made with roasted dandelion root, chickory, barley, and rye. Matt fried eggs from the next door hens on a big griddle and served them with toast and jelly. I took out the uneaten store-bought Key Lime Pie I’d brought along as a gift to myself. We had meant to eat it after dinner the previous night, but none of us had room for it then, so now seemed like a good time. I sliced it into six pieces, which was a mistake being as how the recommended portion, an eighth of a pie, contains a whopping forty-one grams of added sugar. But we all ate it and then we got in one more hug and left with a big sugar buzz.
FARM TOUR
Let’s back up to the previous day when Matt took us out for a tour of the farm. Matt and Bob met at a Colorado biodiesel conference nearly twenty years ago and we’ve been coming to see him and Jenn at Dickinson College Farm ever since. There they run a CSA, some livestock, and a biogas project.
This dragon sculpture protects the nexxus between the farm and the biodigester project. Maybe it is the inspiration for the biogas flare.
Farm tours begin in an outdoor classroom where a blackboard describes the anerobic digestion process.
Pepe waits patiently outside the pavillion.
While the neighbor’s cows lounge beneath some shade trees.
Storm clouds amass on the horizon.
The digester uses cow manure and food waste to create both electricity and heat in a multi-farm collaborative.
Bob thinks this cow’s markings resemble a werewolf.
Several animals wore perfect triangles on their foreheads.
Inputs include culled apples which Matt loads into the digester.
We love watching Matt work because he does nothing half way.
Matt and Bob geeking out in the control room.
Behind us is the digester tank, where the biogas is produced. We have been following Matt’s progress for years, each year getting more sophisticated and producing more biogas.
Here are links to some of our previous farm tours:
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