Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland.
He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms. There are likely hundreds of thousands more wriggling just under the surface of the three-foot mound of wood and crushed river rock before us, which stretches across the equivalent of six football fields. These natural materials form a biofilter that may dramatically cut the methane, nitrous oxide, and water pollution generated by the massive amounts of manure that hundreds of Holstein cows produce each day.
Agueda’s family business, the Alberto Dairy, was one of the first cattle operations in California to adopt this approach to manure treatment, developed and patented by the Chilean company BioFiltro.
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