Eco Living Portugal » Projects

Chicken quarters

Wendy — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:42:34 +0000

It’s been the plan from day one to keep chickens, though it’s taken rather more days than that to get around to it. Keeping chickens is one thing. Exactly how to keep them is another. Free range? Tractor? Permanent pen? All have their fans among the chicken-keeping world and all for persuasive reasons. I thought I had it sorted in my head many times, but then I’d come across an advocate of another method or someone’s bad experience with the method I’d decided on and it would send me off back to the drawing board again.

Back in Scotland, our chickens there had a permanent pen we inherited with the property, but most of the time we let them out to range free around the garden. The Portuguese, on the other hand, almost universally keep them penned into permanent compounds with thick wire and often solid concrete bases. This seemed a bit brutal to me. Left to their own devices, chickens spend a lot of their day scratching up the soil in search of larvae and worms, or sculpting out dust baths. They can’t do that on concrete. Coupled with the frequent presence of guard dogs chained nearby, their imprisonment seemed to epitomise the more utilitarian attitude that prevails in respect of domesticated animals here.

But the proximity of the guard dogs is no accident. Chickens are a favourite on the dinner menu for rather too many of the wild and semi-wild animals that hang around the periphery of human habitation here, and there are a lot more of them here than there are in Scotland. Not just foxes and the odd free-ranging dog, but mongoose, pine martens, genets, wild cats, hawks, eagles, rats, snakes … If I wanted to keep chickens, with the emphasis on keep, then they would need predator-proof accommodation.

So a robust and permanent coop was required, even if I free-ranged or tractored them during the day when our presence on the land would deter all but the most ravenous of predators. At the beginning of last May I decided the bottom terrace would be a good location for permanent housing for them. I picked a north-facing spot which gets the least amount of direct sun in summer and started work on the base of a coop, putting in a level platform and the beginnings of a supporting framework. Then, what with the building and the garden and everything else, it got put to one side and mostly forgotten about until New Year when once again I started to think about chickens.

A week ago some friends went to visit a local chicken breeder and I tagged along. There were chickens ready, a month or so off point-of-lay. The perfect number for all of us to have the number of chickens we wanted. So that was it. I had to finish the coop.

The platform for the chicken shed, completed last May

The first side wall takes shape. The walls are double-skinned with a layer of insulation between to keep out 2 more chicken killers: winter pneumonia and summer heat. The wooden planking is offcuts and rejects from the reroofing and reflooring of the buildings, or pieces that have previously been used for shuttering and other construction

The second side wall waiting for cladding. Yes, the insulation is the very unnatural, unsustainable and unecological blue polystyrene sheeting, but it was left over from the battery house construction and was the perfect thickness for the job. We are aiming to send NO waste from our building projects to landfill

Nesting boxes. 2 of them

The nesting boxes, external view. They’re accessible from the outside of the coop where they’ll also be under cover, keeping temperatures inside cooler in summer and the nests (and the egg-collector) dry when egg-collecting during downpours

Side walls and back wall complete, roosting perch in place

Roof on. On the inside of the coop section of the roof is some left-over 50mm cork insulation, on the outside foil-backed bubble wrap serving as both extra insulation and waterproof membrane

Foundation layer of cana (Arundo donax) thatch on the roof, start of the door frame in position

Door with access hatch complete

Ramp to access hatch and cana thatch complete. The covered verandah has hooks for hanging grain and water dispensers at chicken head-height. It keeps things a lot cleaner than having them at chicken foot-height …

The top layer of cana thatch is held down by 2 cana poles lashed together and tied down under the roof eaves

Close-up of lashing

Thatchwork complete

Close-up of access hatch and ramp

Finished!

The chickens are due to arrive on Thursday. So I have 3 days in which to fence off a compound for them for use when they’re not being free-ranged or tractored. Yes … in the end I decided on a combination of all 3. At least until we’ve discovered what works best for us and the chickens.

Attracting animal manure

Earth Monki — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:15:00 +0000

It seems like a good thing to plant leafy green vegetables next to the newly planted fruit trees. Well, atleast I think it's that. Perhaps it's just the hay? It seems to attract the rabbits and they do their droppings in there. If they are eating the greens in there then it's two positives. One, that it helps with the animals adding their manure around the tree and two it keeps them out of the real vegie garden.

Quinta Nemus 2012-01-28 07:26:00

Eco-quinta Nemus — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:26:00 +0000

Thank you for all the emails offering us help on the farm!!!

We already have someone to come!!

love for all!

Nemus family

Obrigado por todos os emails a ofereçer ajuda na quinta!!!

Nós já encontramos alguém para se juntar a nós!

Paz e amor

família Nemus

Quinta Nemus 2012-01-23 15:20:00

Eco-quinta Nemus — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Nova Eco Aldeia-New Eco Village

Quinta Cabeça do Mato — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:34:00 +0000

Nova blog, new blog
http://permalogica.wordpress.com/

Fim de Semana

Quinta Cabeça do Mato — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

Permaculture Design message

Quinta Cabeça do Mato — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:30:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivd_BqKtDzY

Nova Eco Aldeia de Permacultura

permaecoligica — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:19:37 +0000

A Quinta e situada a 4Km de Tábua, distrito de Coimbra, foi desenvolvida desde 1989 com o intuito de desenvolver uma possível comunidade.

Ao longo dos anos foram criadas infra estruturas comunitárias e promovidos diversos tipos de actividades que permitiram reunir condições favoráveis para tornar o sonho realidade! Com a junçao de Quinta Cabeça do Mato e terrenos de Casa da Ribeira, nosso sonho vai passar em sonho de grupo, uma Nova Eco Aldeia de Permacultura, que chama-se PERMALOGICA
Em breve vamos por mais info no site, estamos com muito trabalho na Horta e menos tempo no net!

Peak Oil happened in 2006?

Magnus — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:29:00 +0000

People have been predicting peak oil for years and it's been denied for as many years by the oil industry and most Governments. This link shows that the International Energy Agency has finally taken a position and stated that it has already happened - in 2006! Bizarre, I mean why aren't we already feeling rising fuel prices on a monthly basis already?

Anyway, this is a good introduction piece to the whole peak oil issue for anyone new to the theory.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Articles/International_Energy_Agency_Reports_Peak_Oil_Happened_in_2006/

A biogas digester septic tank for our home

Magnus — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:05:00 +0000

Our biogas digester coming along...
For more photos click

this

The time has come to install our septic tank. We’ve lived the past 6 months with an outdoorcompost toilet and a drain from the shower that goes into the gardenssomewhere, but a proper house with flushing loos needs a tank to deal with allthat waste.

What happens to our waste? Sewage – it’s so out of sight as to be out ofmind. It’s only when you are building ahouse, or working with people displaced by war or disaster that you have todeal with it.

Howthis post is going to work (it’s way longer than planned, but hey)

First off I’m going to describe the standard sewerage disposal andtreatment systems that we would be expected to use around here, then explainwhat we are doing and why. So bear withme. I want to take you on a short journey,the story of poo. I think it’s worthtalking about because we all have to deal with it, wherever people live, andit’s the cause of countless deaths in poorer countries, billions are investedto deal with it in richer nations, it pollutes our rivers and causes so manyproblems – and despite all this it can be an incredible resource – for energyproduction, soil enhancement and reforestation.

Then I’m going to talk about biogas and show a few examples. Then talk about the plan and biogas septic tankwe’re building outside our house in Portugal.

If you can’t face all this text and reading you can just skip to theslideshow which is

here (all photos and few wordsJ).

Conventionalsewerage treatment

The world over, we treat sewage as a public health hazard, and go toenormous lengths to get rid of it. In richer countries massive seweragenetworks are laid, linking each house to a treatment centre, that then deposits“treated” remains into the sea, or rivers. This systems works, but it costs fortunes to install and assumes afairly well organised and properly funded agency to maintain it all.

This is not the case in most of the world, where people have to dealwith it in other ways, which usually means open sewers, or houses depositingtheir waste into their backyard, or into open drains running through thecommunity. Pretty gross and aundoubtedly a source of water-borne diseases.

We live in a village of about 400 houses where there is no seweragesystem, so each house has their own septic tank. These usually consists of ahole in the ground about 3 to 4m deep into which a column of concrete rings areset, with a little gap between each one. When the sewage enters the solids sitat the bottom and the fluids seep away through the gaps between these pipes(which are usually around 1m diameter by the way). So basically these are soak away pits,probably polluting the local ground-water with faecal chloroforms (somethingyou really want to avoid unless you fancy a bit of dysentery or cholera). It’s not an issue here in Portugal as peopledon’t drink groundwater – it mostly comes from piped networks, is treated withchlorine which kills these bugs and anyway, the earth and rock probably filterout most of these bad guys before they get to the water table. Probably… Theproblem is in places with a shallow water table, but that’s another story.

Most septic tanks have two chambers divided by a wall; as the solidsbreak down (micro-bacteria work their magic on the “solids”) they loose massand rise to the surface (think of the scum and dirty floaties you see inminging beaches when you’re trying to catch a wave). Anyway, these bits float to the second tankwhere an overflow takes away supposedly “clean” water. It’s not really clean, butit’s cleaner than when it went it. Thiswaste or overflow water can be directed through a reed bed or an area filledwith plants to absorb the water and the nutrients that remain in it. Yes – there ARE nutrients. Something we generally tend to ignore. But most systems just redirect this wastewater back into a passing river or whatever. When the solids build up too much (after a few years) a tractor come to“de-sludge” the tank, which it then deposits on nearby fields to fertilise theplace. Gross? Not really, there’s mightynutrients in there, just like putting cow manure on the fields, but we’regetting to that…

The problemof methane production

As you probably know, sewage stinks, but that’s mostly the acids fromurine making the smell – not the methane, which is an odourless gas. All animal dung, including ours, producemethane as it breaks down – which happens when billions of bacteria feed on thestuff and it is they that produce the methane, not our poo. All living things give off gas: plants giveout oxygen, humans breath out carbon dioxide. These mega-bugs give off methane(and a bit of carbon dioxide too).

Every septic tank leaks methane: it’s lighter than air and seeps outthrough soil nice and easy. We don’t know it’s happening because it has no smell. I guess if you were to look at a communitythrough a gas-sensitive lens (like thermal imaging but for methane) you wouldsee plumes of the stuff heading sky-wards, from every backyard, or sewagetreatment plants – at least from those that don’t burn the stuff to cook or tomake electricity.

But you’ve probably heard that methane is a fairly potent green-housegas; apparently it’s 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Climate scientists are worried about meltingpermafrost releasing billions of tonnes of methane which will furtheraccelerate global warming. Well, nowthere’s 7 billion of us folk on-planet now, how much do we contribute every dayor year through our septic tanks?

I looked into this and read a recent study that found that septic tanksprovide around 100 kgs of CO₂ equivalent to the atmosphere perperson, per year. Arguably this isnegligible, but given there’s so many of us it adds up: let’s take a populationof 10m people (that of Portugal, or about 5% of Pakistan). Using this study we can estimate that thismany people produce around 1m tonnes of CO₂ (equivalent) per year,equal to about 100,000 Hummers (fuel-hungry American SUVs).

Checking against a list of countries’ emissions it’s fairly shocking tolearn that this is equivalent to the annual emissions of the Maldives, orSwaziland (or twice that of Liberia). And that’s only from the methane emissions of 10m people’s poo. Take apopulation of 1bn (India’s way past this point already) emissions from septictanks rise to 100m tonnes of CO₂equivalent per year, roughly equal to theannual emissions of Belgium or Iraq.

Does this mean that all our sewage waste is a major greenhouse gas? Itlooks like it, but I’d need to do more research to pin down these numbers. Has anyone else looked into this? If thesenumbers are right surely people would be applying for carbon credits (i.e.cash) to not emit this methane. (Iwonder if we could use these figures to raise carbon financing to build biogassystems in Pakistan, where I work half of the time helping rebuild afterfloods). Anyway, back to the case athand – biogas and our place.

Biogas – areally cool and viable alternative?

Studying at the CAT a few years ago I came across biogas production, afairly straightforward system whereby the sewage tank (or septic tank) is airtight(so no liquids or gas escape). A smallpipe is embedded into the top of the tank, which is round and dome shaped, sothere are no corners where pressure can cause ruptures. The gas in this case is a methane – carbondioxide blend and is flammable: it burns! In smaller systems it’s used forcooking, in large, city-size plants there’s so much more gas it’s used togenerate electricity via a gas turbine. I’ve heard that you can even connect this gas to the intake of a petrolgenerator to make it run, or compress it and make transport gas. Or generate hot water for heating, showers orwhatever.

My friend Sarah Kent did loads of research (and her thesis!) on biogasand told me about places in Nepal where for generations people had cut treesfor firewood till the place was completely denuded. Unable to survive there anymore people were starting to migrate to urban slums. So they introduced biogas plants, initiallyworking just on animal manure. Theseprovided enough gas for cooking; combined with reforestation they have beenable to deal with the problem in some communities.

Then I met David Fulford, of Kingdom Bioenergy, a former renewable energiesprofessor at Reading (UK) and for many years the biogas consultant for AshdenAwards. He worked in Nepal for years, introducing biogas design – and now thereare over 900,000 of small family or community sized plants working there.

I asked if he had a design we could use for human waste – in fact can itwork on our sewage? Given that most of the plants I’d seen worked with animalmanure only. He saw no reason whynot. But why not add in food waste, hesuggested.. And he then pointed me towards this amazing video of a system usedin India that works entirely on food waste.

To combine both human and food waste, David suggested we buy aninsinkerator (a kind of blender that fits below sinks, like in those Americanhorror movies). This would have to beplumbed into the tank, so thought about well in advance. David kindly agreed to help us by designing abasic plant (and has since been really helpful on many fronts!).

David also put me in touch with Govinda Devkota, a Nepalese biogasspecialist who has built thousands of these plants. Govinda sent some great technical guidancematerial which has helped. (He’savailable for consultancies worldwide by the way!).

On-sitefertiliser too!

One of the best “outputs” from a biogas plant is the slurry – which is“delivered” above ground by this system for use as fertiliser and is apparentlyan incredibly good source of nutrients for trees or gardens. Our land has fairly acidic, sandy soil, quitelow in nutrients so we could really use this. So could most of the planet as 80% of our agricultural land is noweffectively denuded by years of intensive chemical agriculture.

So insummary:

Biogas septic tanks (digesters) deal with the problem of pollution to rivers or ground water;
They provide a form of energy that would deal with environmental problems locally while reducing global emission increases from human-based methane production.
This energy can be used to provide free, smokeless gas for cooking – freeing people up in so many countries from the horror of fire-smoke, which WHO reports kills over 2m people per year.
The odourless liquid effluent that biogas tanks deliver could solve the massive food crisis affecting millions in poorer countries – by providing safe and highly effective fertiliser to increase soil fertility, which people can then use to grow more food at home and improve nutrition.

How ourbiogas system should work

First off, here’s a picture of the plan David kindly drew up forus.

The design we're using to build our biogas digester. Source - David Fulford, Kingdom Bioenergy

So far this is what I’ve learned:

- When the sewage in the tank rises to the top of the“digester pit” (see plan) it reaches the bottom of the dome “roof”. At thatpoint all the gas will be collected in the “gas dome”. As the gas pressure builds up here it will“push down” on the liquid in the tank forcing it to “displace” into the slurryreservoir, (to the right of the plan). This body of water in the slurry reservoir will then push down on thegas, providing it with about one bar of pressure – forcing it along the pipeand to the place of end use (a biogas cooking ring for example). As the gas is used up, pressure drops and theliquids will slowly return to finding their level again, until gas builds upagain. Get it?

- When the quantity of liquids in the tank increases,the slurry reservoir will fill up quicker and eventually reach the top, wherethere is an outlet. Here we will connecta pipe and allow it to drain into a small holding tank we’re going to build,where we’ll install a submersible sewage pump. When this holding tank is nearing full the pump to engage and push thewaste material uphill, some 30m away to a bit of land we have where we’ll buildyet another tank, where we will add sawdust to help the slurry become moresolid and manageable for transporting around. David told me about some women in India who added worms, which reallyimproved this process making it even better and more compost-like, which theywere then able to sell as a great fertiliser.

- The temperature in the tank should remain fairly warmto keep the multitudes of friendly bugs happy. This is around 30 degreesC. Very warm in other words. True, butthey do generate their own heat as they work away in their anaerobic(oxygen-free) environment down there. The problem might be the cold earth in which they are surrounded. So we might try and insulate the tank, on topat least. We also plan to put in aheating coil connected to our hot water cylinder so if we every have any“spare” heat we can share a bit of it with our billion-bug generator mates. I’ve included an electric wire so we can puta thermostat in there too, to keep an eye on temperatures. I’m told that theearth around here stays at around 17 degrees C, so we’ll see how theycope.

- We shouldn’t put in too much water into the tank, buttoo little isn’t good either. The amountyou get from a low-flush toilet is, David thinks, probably fine. When we wash food waste down the special sinkwe can do so with warm water, and so decrease the cold shock factor for ourlittle buddies.

- We’ll need a dedicated sink for the food waste cuttingthing – we shouldn’t flush all our washing up water down there, obviously. So we’ve found a space near the kitchen wherewe can have a special sink, but even then I think we should install a two-wayvalve outside, which we will have to turn manually every time we want to directwaste to the tank. That way we can stilluse the sink to wash veg or boots or whatever, and direct that water to thegarden or elsewhere. Complicated? Notreally, just another thing to do and it’s not as if we don’t have enough ofthose!

OK that’s all for now folks. I’ll try and keep posting updates as thingsprogress.