We are very excited to announce that our new woodchip boiler arrived last week from Germany! The Heizomat RHK-400 boiler, one of just a few in the country, was placed into our new barn with a big crane on Thursday! It took us 5 hours and a lot of grunting to unload the many parcels and crates that go along with the very heavy state-of-the-art boiler. Definitely “some assembly required!” and it will be a few weeks before things are put together enough to give a sensible tour, but we can’t wait to show it off later this fall.
The boiler will be transformative in our CSA next year, letting us grow “more of the good stuff, earlier.” Our expectation is that many “high summer crops” like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and eggplant will be at least a month and maybe 2 months earlier, and all without the massive fossil fuel (propane) consumption that is required at most farms to make this possible. And as we get better at operating the system we hope to expand our midwinter vegetable production and storage as well, allowing us to extend our offering of locally grown produce deeper into the cold months and displacing even more imported food.
Getting the boiler onsite feels like a major step along the way in our decade-long project to kick our fossil fuel habit. Switching the greenhouses off propane is one of the steps we outlined in the farm’s 90-in-10 efforts — a 90% reduction in our emissions of fossil carbon over 10 years — which we started in 2018. Astute readers will note that in our plan (original version still on our website under About Us-> Climate Pledge), this boiler was supposed to arrive in 2021. Well, between applying for grants, researching the best possible equipment out there, and working it through the required environmental certification processes, we did the best we could and we are very excited to be so close to checking this piece off the list. As for the climate pledge progress overall, luckily some other stuff happened early, so we are only about a year off schedule on projects and we are ahead of schedule on percentage emissions reduced!
The boiler itself is a system of which there are very few in the U.S. so far, and we are very excited to showcase this innovative technology. The RHK-400 is not a big version of your grandfather’s smoldering outdoor furnace; it is one of the cleanest and most advanced woodchip boilers in the world. Ours is specially equipped with a chip drying system that will enable us to directly use low quality waste woodchips straight from the source – think road crew chips and chips from “weeding” invasive species and misshaped trees as we manage our forest. The flexibility of the boiler to use crude chips with varying moisture content means we can efficiently burn waste wood and byproducts that would likely not otherwise be used. It is also equipped with an advanced cyclone and seven electrostatic precipitators that will remove pollutants from its exhaust, handily beating all the highest European standards for emissions (and the U.S. ones too, of course).
Why biomass and not electrification for our greenhouse heat conversion? This was a carefully thought out choice when we planned the farm’s future energy mix. As we turn off the fossil fuel tap throughout the farm, we are otherwise trending toward electrification of all of our equipment and 100% on-site solar generation. But the greenhouse energy need peaks on cold nights in mid-winter, when our solar panels are not making power, and seasonal storage of solar electricity is not feasible.
We could draw electricity from the grid and run a heat pump to heat the greenhouse, but closer inspection shows that’s not so good, either. You see, during cold snaps in New England, not only is renewable energy generation operating at reduced levels, but natural gas line capacity is not enough to feed both powerplants and direct usage in heating. So, coal and oil fired generation — the dirtiest stuff which doesn’t run the rest of the year — is brought online to make up the shortfall. While, by technicality of REC trading, the electricity on Green Mountain Power’s grid is “all renewable,” in reality electricity generation at times of peak load is finite and fungible. Someone who doesn’t care is buying the coal power even if we buy the hydro. Adding a marginal load to the New England grid in a midwinter cold spell, at least in the near-term decade or two, is asking these dirtiest, oldest, and least efficient sources of electricity to fire up even more. So, we decided the right answer was biomass in our energy mix – done the best way possible. We keep it local and use waste sources of biomass and low grade trees as a means to store sunshine seasonally to meet an energy need that doesn’t match other non-fossil sources. The total consumption of the boiler can sustainably be met from our acreage alone, though we’ll take chips from elsewhere some of the time.
The project is hardly something we’ve done alone. We particularly appreciate financial and technical collaboration from the U.S. Forest Service Wood Innovations program and Efficiency Vermont, as well as Caluwe Energy, and Heizomat. Because of our funding we are also required to place the following statement at the end of our communications about the boiler. It feels odd to use boiler plate to say something we believe in so we’ll also state the simpler version: All are joyously welcomed at Sweetland, all the time. No exceptions!
Cheers
Norah and the Sweetland Crew
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Persons with disabilities who require alternative means of communication for program information (e.g., Braille, large print, audiotape, American Sign Language, etc.) should contact the responsible State or local Agency that administers the program or USDA’s TARGET Center at (202) 720-2600 (voice and TTY) or contact USDA through the Federal Relay Service at (800) 877-8339. Additionally, program information is also available in languages other than English.
Week 18 Harvest
Half Pint
Spaghetti Squash, 1 small
Yellow Onions, 1 pound
Corn, 2 ears
Cabbage, 1 head
Beets, small bunch
Peppers, 1
Kale, small bunch
Cherry tomatoes, half pint
Tomatoes, 2 pounds
Arugula, .25 pound
Garlic, 1 head
Brimming Basket
Spaghetti Squash, 1 large
Yellow Onions, 2 pounds
Corn, 4 ears
Cabbage, 1 head
Beets, small bunch
Peppers, 2
Kale, medium bunch
Cherry tomatoes, half pint
Tomatoes, 3 pounds
Arugula, .35 pound
Garlic, 1 head
Veggie Monster
Spaghetti Squash, 1 small & 1 large
Yellow Onions, 3 pounds
Corn, 6 ears
Cabbage, 2 heads
Beets, large bunch
Peppers, 3
Kale, large bunch
Cherry tomatoes, pint
Tomatoes, 4 pounds
Arugula, .5 pound
Garlic, 2 heads
What’s Cooking This Week
You can find ingredients for all of these recipes in our farm store! We source meats, dairy, grains, beans, sweets, and more from local and sustainable producers. Don’t forget to use your CSA member discount!
- Baked Feta Spaghetti Squash
- Halupki (stuffed cabbage)
- Beet & Corn Salad
- Grilled (!) Kale & Pepper Tuscan Pasta Salad
- Apple, Pecan, Arugula Salad