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January 2014
FARM & RANCH
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In rural Wisconsin, nurses come to the farm
AP Photo/M.L.Johnson Nurse Dawn Dingeldein checks farmer Jay Vomastic’s blood pressure Dec. 2 in his home in Shawano County, Wis. Dingeldein works for the Rural Health Initiative, a program based in Shawano that sends nurses to farms to provide basic preventive care, including blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar checks.
M.L. JOHNSON Associated Press SHAWANO, Wis. — Wisconsin dairy farmer Kevin Ainsworth rushed to the emergency room in 1992, when he sliced off the tip of his finger. Other than a quick trip in 2010 when a test during a blood donation raised a false alarm about hepatitis C, that was his last visit to a doctor. His father jokingly hassles him about needing a prostate exam now that he's past 50, but Ainsworth shrugs that off. With a $5,000 deductible on his health insurance policy and a never-ending slate of chores, he's not eager to spend time or money on medical care that isn't absolutely necessary. Ainsworth is a typical dairy farmer, more likely than most Americans to go without health insurance or buy his own policy. For years, he has received basic care from a unique community program that sends a nurse to farms to check farmers' blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels and screen them for health risks. Farmers with signs of serious problems are referred to a doctor or clinic. Agriculture and health care advocacy groups had hoped the new federal health care law would improve farmers' situation by allowing them to buy affordable policies that cover preventive care and have lower deductibles. No savings are to be had, say farmers who've been shopping for insurance and believe they'll end up with plans similar to their current ones. That's why the Rural Health Initiative remains valuable. "I would say most farmers, in general, if it's not a lost limb or something crushed, they're probably not going to go to the doctor. If you've got a virus, it's going to wear off," said Jay Vomastic, another dairy farmer who lives minutes from Ainsworth in central Wisconsin's Shawano County. Most dairy farms in Shawano County are generations-old and small enough to be run by a family, perhaps with one or two workers.
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January 2014
“We just clean it up, de-water it, centrifuge it and filter it to take out all the impurities down to half-a-micron, and then we put it in our diesel tractor engine,” he added. Quinn said that he and the contracted producers grow a high-oleic safflower that is high in monounsaturated fats and lacks polyunsaturated fats. This means the safflower oil — unlike recently banned transfats — is loaded with what are commonly called good fats, helping to lower LDL cholesterol, the bad kind. High-oleic safflower also has a long, stable shelf life, making it ideal for commercial usage. While all this means that the oil is good for human consumption and his customers are happy with the oil and their customers’ satisfaction, Quinn said, it also means that the recycled oil seems to be a quality diesel substitute as well. They only use the safflower oil they recycle from their own customers. “We want to make sure we’re getting back the high-oleic safflower oil because that works best in the engines. The other mixtures you’re better off to make biodiesel with it,” he said. He had originally researched going the biodiesel mixture route, he said, but opted to install on his tractor a conversion system that allows the engine to use straight safflower oil, which is also referred to as vegetable oil. “With the high-oleic, we can use the straight vegetable oil. We have to start the engines on diesel, and once they’re warmed up, they can pre-heat the vegetable oil up to 160 degrees, as far as necessary, and then that goes into the engine,” he said. “The engine can’t really tell the difference between that and diesel.” So far, they have used the safflower oil only experimentally in their equipment, and initial results, he said, show no apparent dif-
Wikimedia Commons This undated photo shows a safflower plant. ference between using unused oil and recycled oil as fuel. They will be furthering their studies of the safflower oil in the coming farming season. “That’s what we’ll find out this year. We did some experiments, but now this will be the first time we’ve run it over a longer period of time,” he said. “And if it works, well then, we’ll expand it.” Earl Fisher BioFuels in Chester, owned and operated by Brett Earl and Logan Fisher, has gone the route of processing canola seed into biodiesel for the canola crop producers. Their facility also produces home fuel, pellet fuel, garden micro-nutrients and compost fuel, their website says. In addition to processing the oilseeds, the facility also cleans and converts to biodiesel recycled food-grade oils. Taylor Lyon of Montana Biofuel Exchange collects used cooking oil from area restaurants and deliv-
■ See Ag energy Page 6
This undated photo shows a bank of solar panels.
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