The news is full of articles on biofuels; how to make diesel from your French fry oil and put it in your 4X4, how to make methane from waste products, how to make an alcohol burner for next to nothing, and so on.  We’re big fans of biofuels for power, but we also keep it simple.  We haven’t found anything as simple as planting zacate grass with coffee to feed horses for power.

A coffee farmer needs a strong back.  He’ll carry 100 to 150 lbs of coffee from his field to his home, often a 5 kilometer trek.  He’ll carry up a 100 lb sack of fertilizer, a 35 lb backpack sprayer, or a 40 lb box of coffee plants.  More often than not, he’ll have avocados or other fruit growing with his coffee, and that comes down on his back.  It’s hard work.

A farmer with a field of 1 cuerda will harvest about 2000 lbs of coffee fruit.  That’s 20 trips up and down the volcano.  That’s a solid 20 trips, perhaps 10 km round trip, with 100 lbs of coffee.  In order to get that field planted, he made 15 trips, carrying those coffee plants uphill.  To put that another way, he had to carry a minimum of 2600 lbs of weight, while covering 350 kilometers, half of that with a load on his back, in order to get his first 266 lbs of roast coffee to market.

It’s no surprise that one of the first purchases a farmer makes after joining As Green As It Gets is a horse or mule.  Quality of life is much better without huge weights on his back.  Productivity increases several times over because a mule can carry much more than a man.  That farmer is more productive in the fields because he hasn’t lost so much energy going up and down the field.  Those fields are more productive because they get generous additions of manure as fertilizer.

Where does the fuel come from to power these amazing machines, these horses?  From those same coffee fields.  Farmers intercrop a local grass called zacate, something of a hearty bunch grass.  They plant it on the perimeter of their field, where it serves as a boundary.  If the horse is at the field, he can graze on the edge of the field without damaging the crops.  Once established, the zacate continually grows, each plant giving a harvest of grass about three times a year.

We’re taking this zacate biofuel one step further.  After the horse has processed the zacate, there’s still energy in it.  We turn it into methane in a simple bopdigester that provides fuel for cooking.  After processing, it still contains good organic material to fertilize the fields.

Hi tech it isn’t, but the simple combination of a mule and zacate grass can easily increase productivity.