Dairy bubble(s) of another kind raise a stink in east-central Indiana

Lauren Etter of The Wall Street Journal does a great job covering the business of farming, which often lends itself to colorful and unusual stories. Sometimes, those stories tell larger stories about the business and its ramifications. Her latest, from near Winchester, Ind., is one of those. It begins, "Like many of his neighbors, farmer Tony Goltstein has to deal with the aftermath of the dairy bubble. But besides his mounting financial troubles, Mr. Goltstein also must contend with bubbles the size of small houses that have sprouted from the pool of manure at his Union Go Dairy Farm. Some are 20 feet tall, inflated with the gas released by 21 million gallons of decomposing cow manure. But he has a plan. It requires a gas mask, a small boat and a Swiss Army knife." Etter then tells us that the seven-year saga of the bubbles, which can be seen in satellite photos (MapQuest image), "traces the recent boom and bust of U.S. dairy farmers."

The physics of the problem are that a plastic liner became detached from the bottom of a sewage lagoon, manure got under it, and gas from it formed the bubbles seem behind Golstein here (Etter photo). Now the bankrupt farmer has asked for state permission to puncture the bubbles, but that worries his neighbors, and a state environmental official is wary. "Not knowing how much volume of gas is there and how much pressure is on it, we're concerned with just cutting a hole," Bruce Palin, assistant commissioner of the Office of Land Quality, told Etter, who notes, "Last year, a hog farmer in Hayfield, Minn., was launched 40 feet into the air in an explosion caused by methane gas from a manure pit on his farm. He sustained burns and singed hair." (Read more)

UPDATE, April 2: The state has given the farm permission to release the gas as long as it uses a vale or valves to control the release, Seth Slabaugh of The Star Press in Muncie reports.