CMS is proud to be developing a website for Enviro Energy, LLC, in Franklin New York
Inoculating 70 hardwood logs with shitake mushroom spore wasn’t time-consuming enough for Bob and May Miller. Now, together with their son Mike and his wife Mary Lou, the Millers are starting a family business. Called Enviro Energy, LLC, the business will manufacture grass pellets for home and commercial
use.
Based on Route 7 in Wells Bridge, on the site of an operating gravel mine, Enviro Energy will offer a locally produced heating fuel that, says Mike Miller, “is actually good for the environment.” If this seems hard to believe, EE’s brochure tells us: “Grass pellets have almost the same BTU’s per pound as wood pellets, without ever cutting down a tree…Pellet stoves and boilers produce 90% less greenhouse gas than fossil fuels, and are ten times under the EPA emission limits. It takes seventy million years to grow gas or oil, twenty to a hundred to grow a tree, but only 70 days to grow a new crop of grass.”
“But what really got Dad going,” Mike continues, “were the thousands of acres around here that people are paying someone to brushhog and let lie. All that fuel going to waste!” Grass pellets can be made of almost any biomass, wild or cultivated, though woody stems are best. “The older and tougher it is, the
better,” Mike declares. “We can use old hay, ruined hay, hay that got rained on. Okay if it’s full of
goldenrod and multiflora roses.” Switch Grass is commonly used but has too long a growing
season to be practical in Delaware County.
The Millers prefer Reed’s Canary Grass. “It matures in early August, by which time it’s four to five feet tall. It gives the best tonnage per acre.” And it’s a hardy perennial. Plough and plant once, and there’s your crop. Bob Miller adds: “There’s a stand of Reed’s Canary Grass up on the old Burgin farm that’s been there for 48 years!”
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