Neptune Farm
723 Harmersville-Canton Road, Salem, NJ 08079
Telephone: 856-935-3612
Sustainable energy
The Natural Resources Conservation Service has
helped us tune up our farm in a lot of ways, so that it provides habitat for
wildlife as well as farm animals, recycles nutrients in a positive way, and
builds better farmland for the long term.
Besides conserving our air,
water, soil, and the creatures that live in them, we're deeply committed to
reducing our carbon footprint, so here are some of the things we've done.
Solar panels: 
A few
years ago, we installed a 35 kW system on our two south-facing sheds. Some of the people who made it happen were
our installer, RCL Enterprises, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities,
and the USDA's Rural Development agency.
We also thought about wind,
because the NREL maps looked as if we might
have Class II winds at our site, and we were lucky to get into the Rowan
University anemometer loan program.
A group of engineering students set up a 60-foot tower on our farm and
compiled data for a year.
Unfortunately, like most of New Jersey, we don't have enough windpower
to justify the investment. Here are our
data:
The Rowan
students also did an energy audit of our farm, funded by the NRCS, and recommended some fixes that reduced
our electricity consumption by more than 30%. In addition to installing a lot of CFLs, we re-insulated the pump
room at the cowshed and installed a thermostat on the milk house heater that
keeps the well pump from freezing.
We want to reduce, and,
ultimately, eliminate consumption of petroleum products. One of the first things we did was to
convert our greenhouse from oil heat to passive solar by scavenging a lot of
50-gallon plastic drums from the recycling yard of our friends at Clement Pappas & Co., who make
private-label organic juices. It took
74 water-filled drums to create enough mass to moderate temperatures so
that tender plants can survive our
winters. We use some row cover,
too.
The farmhouse was heated by
oil-fired hot water, but it has a Vermont Castings stove and several
fireplaces. By burning deadfall we'd
pulled off the fencelines, we got down to a single tank of heating oil a
year. We thought we were getting too
old to stoke an outdoor woodburning furnace, even if we could find one that
didn't smoke, and we had extra electricity, so we decided to try an electric
boiler. It uses a lot of juice, but
it's quiet, non-smelly, and doesn't need to be overhauled annually. Here's what it looks like:
Now our principal
petro-guilt comes from vehicles and farm machinery. As soon as it was available locally, we began buying B20 from Woodruff Energy, but we've been
unable to find a supplier of 100% biodiesel.
We'd love not to have to make it ourselves, but it's starting to look as
if that last 80% is our next frontier.