How to Make BioGas

1. Start with feed.

2. Add two hungry pigs

3. Let nature take its course
 

4. Trap the gas from all that nature before it gets away!

(You can see the huge balloon that traps the gas just behind the piggies in this picture.)

5. Cook.

We've just recently gotten the biogas system back running here at the farm, but I have to say its one of my favorite things I´ve learned about here.  It is such a simple, simple system, but it does so much.  What amounts to an enormous black trash bag and a few meters of piping transforms a waste product into renewable energy.  Some people around here say that they would never eat food cooked with biogas, but Luz and I like to say it's the cleanest possible gas to use.  The flame, by the way, looks just exactly the same, and it smells nearly the same as the odor they give to the gas you buy in tanks.  With two small pigs, we are cooking well over half of the food for a family of six plus a hungry gringa.  Why don't more people do this?

Meet your Meat

One of the reasons I came to Costa Rica, and specifically one of the reasons I wanted to spend time on a farm, was to better aquaint myself with my food.  Most everyone in America is removed - very removed from the food they eat, including myself.  What would it be like to eat food that I knew intimately?  I had a pretty good idea that eating food from a garden not thirty feet away would be pretty great, but what about meat?

Having been a vegetarian/occcasional pescatarian in New Orleans last year, I began eating meat again when I arrived in Costa Rica.  I wanted to test my theory that I was only okay with eating meat if I knew where it came from and could be honestly aware of what I was eating. Most of the meat that we eat at Finca Chinchilla comes from the farm itself, from animals that I have contact with every day.  It´s been an interesting project so far - one that I´ll be writing about more in the next bit.  For today though, a few pictures of my friends and food.  Sad but true: food is cute!

Some tiny chicks that the Chinchillas bought to eat.

They´ll be ready in about a month and a half.

Close up!

Fun fact: in Costa Rica (and elsewhere), chicks say "pio pio" instead of "cheep cheep!"

This little guy belongs to Memo´s brother.

He is a huge scaredy-cat, but ridiculously adorable.