Spinning a 900lb cow sculpture into tractor fuel

What do you do with 900lbs of cow sculpture made out of butter? Well, turn it into 810lbs of biofuel, what else. That's the plan anyway according to Pennsylvania State University researchers.

At the conclusion of the huge Pennsylvania Farm Show, which runs through Jan. 12, about 900 pounds of butter used in the event's famous butter sculpture will be scraped off its frame by Penn State farm operations workers, plopped into barrels sent to the university for conversion into biodiesel.

Donated by Land O'Lakes, the butter will be converted into fuel by a chemical process currently used by both Penn State and the a local high school to recycle waste oils from cafeterias and dining halls into biodiesel, which is then used to power tractors and other equipment.

The butter to be recovered from the sculpture will not provide a huge amount of biofuel, but it is indicative of the potential that agricultural and waste products offer for displacing much of the petroleum used by our society, Penn State researchers said in a release.

"Doing some rough calculations - the 900 pounds of butter equates to about 810 pounds of biofuel," said Glen Cauffman, manager of Penn State's farm operations. "We can get about a gallon of biofuel from every 7 pounds, so that means the butter when converted would provide about 116 gallons of fuel. At today's petroleum prices, that would be worth about $377. The big tractor we run on 100% biofuel here at Penn State uses about 5 gallons per hour, so the butter from the sculpture represents about 23 hours of use for the tractor."

Sculptor Jim Victor of Conshohocken began crafting the design in mid-December and spent approximately 10 days sculpting the butter.

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