Farmer goes whole hog with corn burning alternative
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
By Erik Posz
LAMBERTON, Minn. -- More people are buying and using corn-burning stoves each year to heat their homes.
John Derickson of rural Lamberton has taken burning corn as heating fuel to the next step.
Sure he heats his 2,800-square foot farm home with corn, but he also heats two hog barns with the biomass fuel to keep his 2,000 head of hogs toasty warm all winter long.
Derickson, who has been heating his hog operation with corn since 2004, made the switch to corn from LP gas for the most obvious reason: saving money.
"Energy prices have escalated dramatically in LP in the prior years and something need to be done," Derickson said.
What Derickson did was to install a LDJ A-Maize-Ing Heat furnace in his nursery, finishing barn and a corn stove in his house.
"All winter long, for both barns and the house I won't burn but 350 bushels of corn," Derickson said. "I'm never going to miss 350 bushels of corn. I'll never even know I didn't have it. But I sure would know if I paid the LP bill."
Derickson farms about 600 acres in addition to running the hog operation. Being able to grow his own fuel made making the switch to corn an even sweeter deal.
"In the harshest months of winter, it wasn't uncommon for me to burn upwards of 1,000 gallons a month of LP in the nursery alone," Derickson said.
With LP prices running around $1.40 per gallon last winter, and with one bushel of corn putting out about as much heat as 5.5 gallons of LP, it was like getting paid $7.70 per bushel for corn.
Derickson's wife, Brenda, said that she has seen other benefits from adding corn heat to the hog barns. During the winter when they burned LP, they looked for the minimum amount of air they had to move through the barn in effort to conserve heat. Burning corn changed that.
"With the corn furnaces we are able to keep the heat higher in the barns," Brenda said. "You get to move more air, thus the air quality is much better. And you've got a dryer barn. You move more air, have lower humidity and have healthier pigs."
The corn furnaces didn't have any problem keeping up with the tough Minnesota winters.
When Derickson put the corn furnace in his nursery, the building was empty. It was the middle of February and 20 degrees below zero.
"I though, lets see what this baby can do," Derickson said. "I stoked it up and kept the building at a solid 87 degrees with no pigs in it. That was more than 100 degrees above the outside air temperature. For a 48-foot by 76-foot building, that's pretty good."
There are a couple of weeks in the fall and then again in the spring that Derickson said are tough to figure out what do with running the corn furnace, though.
"The one negative in the house is that when you get those fall days where you have 40 degrees as a high, you crank up the corn stove and gets too warm," Derickson said. "In the barns I have the capability of running a thermostat."
