Manure entrepreneur turns dairy waste into green energy

The tech­nol­ogy is fairly sim­ple. What’s hard about a manure digester is link­ing farm­ers, bankers, reg­u­la­tors, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and utilities.

“An urban lib­eral would get laughed off the farm” for try­ing to con­vince risk-averse dairy­men they can save money while ben­e­fit­ing the envi­ron­ment, said the lanky, bearded 35-year-old.

But with rural roots, as well as an MBA, Maas seems uniquely suited to the task.

“Whether any­one else could have car­ried this off I don’t know,” said Don Wick, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Skagit County Economic Development Association in Mount Vernon. “I had to admire their tenac­ity and bold­ness. They really believed in this.”

Maas’ fer­vent push for digesters grew from see­ing fam­ily dairies slowly dis­ap­pear­ing, despite their cen­tral place in the farm econ­omy as sources of year-round jobs, nat­ural local fer­til­izer and, of course, milk. His uncle in Minnesota recently gave up on dairy farming.

“It’s tragic,” Maas said.

He him­self has never milked a cow, though he raised a calf as a 4-H project. Still, grow­ing up in Mount Vernon, both he and his younger brother worked sum­mers for nearby farm­ers who grew every­thing from tulips and blue­ber­ries to spinach and hay. Their par­ents came from farm fam­i­lies, as did many friends at Mount Vernon Christian School.

“There were a lot more farms and a lot more cows” in Skagit County back then, Maas said. “At that point every­body milked 30, 40, 50 cows. … Now you can’t make a middle-class income with that.”

Even dairies with sev­eral hun­dred cows are being squeezed by urban sprawl, envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions and spik­ing feed costs. Adding elec­tric­ity to the mix of farm prod­ucts can help them sur­vive, Maas said.

Yet Washington, with nearly 500 dairy farms, has only five digesters.

Maas was teach­ing high-school his­tory in south­west Minnesota when he saw farm­ers set­ting up wind tur­bines on their land to gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity and sup­ple­ment their income.

“It was really excit­ing to see these $2 mil­lion projects going in, and local guys owned them,” Maas said.

He and his brother tried to get a wind project going on their uncle’s farm but lacked the finan­cial savvy, Maas said.

So he enrolled at Bainbridge Graduate Institute on Bainbridge Island, which calls itself the first MBA pro­gram in sus­tain­able business.

Farm Power’s busi­ness plan was his final project at the school. Daryl, after fin­ish­ing a tour in the Air Force, joined him in 2007 to form Farm Power. That first digester wasn’t easy. “It took us two and a half years from when we started the com­pany to when we made the first kilowatt-hour,” said Maas, who is Farm Power’s president.

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