Tom Butler: 
00:09
You gonna let Pop Pop take you today?

Luna Butler:
00:11
Yeah.

Tom Butler:
00:12
Ok.

Tom Butler:
00:14
This one’s hard for Pop Pop’s old arthritic fingers. You feel all safe and snug?

Luna Butler:
00:21
Yeah.

Tom Butler:
00:22
Ok.

Luna Butler:
00:22
I’m ready to go.

Tom Butler:
00:24
Ok, I’m ready.

Tom Butler:
00:27
In this area of the country, there wasn't anything like growing poultry or swine on large scales.

Luna Butler:
00:34
Pop Pop, today after school, could I go to your work?

Tom Butler:
00:40
After school, we’ll go to the farm.

Tom Butler:
00:43
Prestage farm came to us and it just sparked our interest. Just to drive out to one of these barns and it looks like a big jet plane sitting up there with the big fans on the ends of the houses and stuff and it was so modern looking and clean. We were interested in making money, we’re capitalists, and we were willing to give it a shot.

TEXT SLIDE:
01:01
For nearly two decades, Tom Butler has raised hogs on his 130-acre farm in Harnett County, N.C. He currently has more than 6,000 hogs.

Phillip Page:
01:10
Well my granddaddy, both granddaddies, we raised hogs on the ground. They had a little shelter they could get under and that was about it. And when I seen the first ones of these built, I was kind of shocked they were going to put that many pigs inside of a building and they weren’t ever going to get to go on the ground again.

Tom Butler:
01:32
That’s the Prestage truck bringing us our very first pigs, June 25,1995. That’s some of our very first pigs on their first day at the farm.

Dave Hull:
01:47
It’s just you and the pigs, nobody else to fuss with. And the pigs win every time, so it don’t matter. Just like being married. No matter what’s going on, animal health is always first. They’ve got to depend on somebody just how we depend on somebody.

Tom Butler:
2:07
We never thought one moment about waste, or the impact on the environment. The first barn I ever flushed I went back there and I pulled that plug and I smelled that stuff and I said, What have I gotten myself into?

Tom Butler:
02:26
We weren't what they call tree huggers or greenies or radicals or anything. I mean I smell the lagoons at my house, so I said if I can ever help with that smell, I’ll do it. And then I had a chance to cover the lagoons. When you cover your lagoon, you do away with all the lagoon odor.  And we were destroying the greenhouse gases, but we were wasting all that energy. And I said, that’s wasting money. We could be using that as a fuel by putting that methane through a generator engine.


Tom Butler:
02:59
Basically, you just take pig manure and you put it in a covered area, and Mother Nature does all the work. And you’re gonna make methane automatically, and you run that through a pipe and it’ll turn a generator and it’ll make electricity.

Phillip Page:
03:17 
Thomas, he’ll try anything. It’s expensive. I don’t know what the return’s gonna be, that’s what concerns me. Is it gonna be enough to actually make him break even? Nobody really knows.

Tom Butler:
03:37
Most of them think it's foolishness. Not in a bad way but it just will not ever work. So far they're right. We just haven't gotten the economics right. If I can live to be 80. (laugh) Really, I think it’ll happen in the next five years. Right now, I’d just say we’ve got a system that’s working, but it has, like on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s about a 2. And we're encouraged enough to keep trying.

Tom Butler:
04:12
I talk to people all over the world about renewable energy. I don’t sleep much, I’m up at four o’clock in the morning because that’s the best time to talk to China and places like that.

Tom Butler:
04:31
I just believe that you can take waste and make it an asset, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

What drives me is at the end of the day to tell the industry it can be done. It can be done cheap enough that an average producer can do it.

Tom Butler:
04:53
To be sustainable, we have to have permission to operate in the community, and to have that permission, we need to do the right environmental things.