But something equally simple derailed him -- mud. And it took him years to resolve the problem.

ENERGY PRODUCER: Tulare County dairy owner Ron Koetsier uses a digester to produce energy from cow manure. (Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee)

Koetsier is a rare breed of dairy farmer, willing and able to spend a lot of money on a technology that scares many of his peers. Systems such as his allow manure to decompose while they capture the resulting methane and send it to a generator to make electricity.

In the process, the methane or biogas system prevents most of the pollution-causing manure gases from escaping into the air. Seemingly, it's the perfect air-quality and energy-producing answer for dairy farmers.

But many dairy farmers are discouraged by the expense and difficulty in selling their extra electricity to utilities. If that's not bad enough, Koetsier's story would make many folks run the other way.

In the late 1980s, mud made his life miserable as he tried to flush manure out of open corrals into a pit where the manure could decompose.

Too much mud flushed into the pit. His so-called plug-flow digester operates on manure, not mud. It just didn't work.

Koetsier had to shut down the digester for years until he could replace his stalls and buy a vacuum truck for his 1,450-cow dairy. He paid another $200,000 to make it work.

"Now we suck the manure off the lanes daily," he says. "It's still pretty simple. But it's labor intense. It takes four or five hours a day."

He moves the manure to a covered concrete pit. The manure slowly decomposes, making methane in the process. The methane is captured in pipes to power a 130-kilowatt electricity generator.

Other versions of the digester system can cost less, experts say. But the cost still could be several hundred thousand dollars.

A recent government incentive program is attracting attention from a few dozen dairy owners, but many operators still are cautious.

"It's another layer of management and expense," says one dairy official who asked to remain anonymous. "That discourages many people."

Not Koetsier. Even if he has to buy some energy from Southern California Edison Co., he believes he will reduce his monthly bill by up to $7,000. With electricity price increases over the last year, he may save even more.

"We want to run our generator all the time," he says. "Normally, we'll sell more than we buy."

That means Koetsier wants to produce enough electricity to run his dairy and send the surplus into California's central grid. Koetsier likes the idea of being insulated from energy problems such as the rolling blackouts that occurred last year.

"I'll be in control of my own utility bill," he says.