The Farm is one of the most incredible and sustainable spots on the Chewonki Neck. As both an educational and a working farm with agriculture and livestock, the farm is an integral part of Chewonki and all of its programs.

Much of the food served at Chewonki is made from meat and vegetables from the farm. That is a really special and sustainable part of the lifestyle here. Not only does it taste delicious, but it prevents excess carbon emissions as a result of its lack of packaging and the fact that it doesn’t require any trucking or shipping to get to our plates!

Helping Chewonki’s residents to get to know their food and how it is produced is also a big part of the farm’s mission. It is really incredibly important to know where our food, especially meat, comes from. Although it is hard at times to separate yourself emotionally from the animals, knowing that most of them are being raised for slaughter, it means a lot to be sure that the animals have

been treated with respect and have had good lives. At Chewonki, sheep, cows, chickens and pigs are raised and sent to slaughter.

During the colder months, food is taken from the farm in other ways. In the fall is the harvest, and otherwise the milk cow Lola is milked twice daily and eggs are collected from the chickens. Lola produces around thirty-two pounds of milk daily. Some of the milk and eggs are sold to normal folks, while much of it is sent to the kitchen and used to drink, cook with, make cheese out of, and generally feed the inhabitants of Chewonki. Check back soon for more specifics on Salt Marsh Farm!

-Alexandra

This week’s Go Green project will teach you how to decrease the amount of energy used to light your home.  Saving energy in your lighting system is very easy and will also save you money.  The simplest way to decrease the energy that you use for lighting is to install energy efficient light bulbs.

Incandescent lightbulbs work by heating a small wire inside the bulb called a filament.  Once this filament reaches a certain temperature it begins to glow creating light.  Because of this design traditional incandescent lightbulbs release 90% of their energy as heat making them terribly inefficient and somewhat dangerous. The average incandescent lightbulb only converts about 2% of its energy into visible light.

Nowadays incandescent lightbulbs are being replaced by the more efficient, fluorescent lightbulb.  Electricity flows into the fluorescent lightbulb exciting that gases inside the bulb which then create a strong fluorescent glow.  Fluorescent lightbulbs are much more efficient than incandescent lightbulbs and can turn 22% of their energy into light energy.  Fluorescent lightbulbs are more expensive to buy than incandescent lightbulbs but they are known to last ten times longer.  In the end fluorescent lighting is an investment that will save you money.

All fluorescent lightbulbs are more efficient than the common incandescent lightbulb.  However if you are really set on Going Green we suggest you search for Energy Star qualified products.  Energy Star is a standard set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

-Peter

JULY 26, 2011

Making much of our own food makes a huge difference. Sarah, Bill, Lisa, and Heather are the chefs at Chewonki, along with a few lucky semester students each week. These wonderful artists of food make all of the bread at Chewonki, which is vital considering the monumental amount of toast that the students go through daily. This is a great way to cut down on the immense amount of packaging involved in most large kitchens. Also, there are two leftover meals a week so we waste as little food as possible.
However, Chewonki has an excellent method of dealing with any food waste created. Throughout the kitchen and dish room are green compost bins and white slop bins. All kitchen waste that is a natural substance but inedible, like rinds and egg shells, goes is the compost bucket, and all uneaten edible food goes into the slop bucket. The compost is in an enormous pile behind the farm where it is eventually used as nutrition rich fertilizer to grow more Chewonki food. The slop is also brought to the farm and fed to the chickens and pigs. Only at a place like this could a junior in high school start of their day by milking the cow, then go to intense academic classes, then make cheese out of the milk they milked that morning. The Chewonki food cycle is so incredible!!
-Alexandra

JULY 26, 2011
Sustainable Spots – The Wind Turbine

The wind turbine on the Salt Marsh Farm was completed in the fall of 2010. It is a wonderfully productive source of renewable energy on the Chewonki Campus. The turbine has blades of 9 feet and is 100 feet tall. The capacity of production of the wind turbine is 6.5 Kilowatts per hour. The wind turbine is tied to the grid so all of the energy it creates is that much less that we need to pay the electric company for, and makes cleaner energy. Maine is a pretty windy place, especially on the coast, that makes for an ideal location for the wind turbine. Also, there is more wind during the winter than the summer in Maine, and more wind means more energy, which is awesome!
-Alexandra

This month, the Sustainabiliy Office will be tackling a perplexing and very relevant question – how to retrofit a large building’s heating system – to move away from using fossil fuels, and to move towards a greener alternative.

To address this question, we are giving Chewonki’s largest building, the Center for Environmental Education, an energy overhaul. Currently, the building is primarily heated with oil, and a small geothermal unit is taking care of Chapin Hall which is roughly a third of the building’s area.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be adding an additional geothermal unit to handle about 80% of the heating load of this building. The geothermal units will act in series – only one will come on during the shoulder seasons, and will be able to heat the entire building. As the winter progresses, and the temperature drops, the second geothermal unit will come online, to help with the increased heating load. These two will be able to handle the vast majority of the heating year. We are leaving the original heating oil furnace in place to handle the coldest times of the year.

As it turns out, buying a geothermal system to handle 100% of the heating load is exponentially more expensive than buying a system to heat 80% of the heating load – this is why we incorporated this system into our building.

We did it!   After fours years of effort, a 100-foot wind tower was raised and employed on our campus last week. Today, the wind really started to pick up and we’ll get to see what kind of power gets generated.

The installation consists of a 100-foot self-supporting tower carrying a 6.6-kilowatt wind turbine, providing power to Chewonki’s largest staff housing building and producing an estimated 6,000 kilowatt-hours per year.

Peter says the building currently consumes about 5,500 kilowatt-hours of power per year.  On balance, this turbine moves the energy needs of this building from the power grid and to local, sustainable wind. Because the turbine is a “grid-tied system, any electricity not used by the building will be metered and generate credits that can be used in the future.  We’ll keep you posted on our efforts.