This is the beating heart of a farm design based on the concept of #Silvopasture. My thinking is this is how Bitcoin will directly integrate into agriculture beyond farmers and ranchers accepting payment in Bitcoin for their products. To be brief this system converts woody farm waste to energy, #biochar, and wood vinegar. A Silvopasture, properly managed, can produce a massive amount of wood for feedstock. The Electricity produced is used to power Bitcoin miners and a wood chipper. The residual heat of the miners and generator is used to reduce the moisture content of the woody feedstock and then heat a greenhouse. The biochar and wood vinegar are used as soil amendments and much more. Biochar added to soil acts as a battery for water (making trees, shrubs, and grasses drought tolerant) and nutrients. NOTE: This is a much longer discussion but suffice it to say that I want as much Biochar in my soil as I can get. It makes soil resilient. Wood Vinegar? Yeah, that's a massive discussion all by itself but . . . you want it in the soil as well. Electricity produced: Possibly 2 MW but . . . it depends. Bitcoin mined: It depends but maybe 0.11 BTC per day. Biochar/Wood Vinegar produced: That depends on the gasifier.

Replies (19)

There's a guy doing mining using manure and digesting it. Pretty awesome to see farmers start to figure out ways to use there waste.
Henry's avatar
Henry 2 years ago
Just need to get the land, we can zap you sats to help buy the rest. 🤙
New follower of yours, really interesting to me as I've got a small hobby farm and a lot of wood waste. Any episodes of your podcast that get into it?
@npub15879...kv0n has done several podcasts on biochar and if you search on his Web page you can find interviews on using waste energy to power miners and wood gasifiers in general.
Fantastic! I'm a forester in the private timber industry. Finding a useful home for the byproducts of harvesting and fuels management is always a major challenge. I love where I work and feel grateful and fortunate to have the opportunity to do it. I've been trying to figure out where my career can intersect with Bitcoin tech, because that's what I truly would love to do. Thank you for this inspiration!
This is the MOST state-of-art version out there. A meat processing plant, Wamolers Farm, in TN is generating 500 Kw 24/7/365 off of 3 acres of cane grass. Here's a talk by the inventor of that version of these: This is commonly referred to as "wood gasification", some crazy DIY guys have Ben running their trucks off a wood stove in the bed of the truck. Creating biochar as a "waste" product is a massive value add if it's added back to the soil too. Those ProtonPower versions can somehow create liquid diesel fuel too, rather than just running generators off the smoke. Then the deisal can be used to harvest and mulch the on-site bio.ass. Humans are not only incredibly stupid, some are amazingly brilliant!
I've given up with trying to capture the sin gasses & create the bio-char with an air tight kiln. I'm now using an open air kiln with high sides 1200mm using corrugated iron & then quenching with water. The corrugated iron restricts the oxygen & reflects the heat. Only the top layer gets oxygen & you add wood as the top layer converts to charcoal. I have no shortage of feedstock right now because I'm thinning my trees. The quality of the biochar is not as high (incomplete pyrolysis) but it produces multiple times more volume of charcoal for the same effort/time. I'd love to capture the gas but haven't seen an economical way. image