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Strange Bedfellows: Cows and Paper
It’s a no-brainer to toss your used paper into a recycling bin instead of throwing it in the trash. But John and Helen Kahl have taken paper recycling one huge step further.
John and Helen own Germanvale Dairy, a 70-cow dairy farm in SouthernWisconsin. A typical farm that size would use straw for cow bedding, the material that absorbs the animals’ droppings. But the Kahls use waste paper that they collect and shred themselves.
The dairy farm has been in the Kahl family for over 100 years, or four generations. John's father, 86-year-old Ralph Kahl, is the previousowner. Ralph stays connected to the dairy through his “paper route,” picking up paper throughout town for the cows’ bedding. Several local businesses, the senior housing facilities and the public library save their waste papers for the Kahls.
A simple process turns paper from scrap to bedding. The paper is loaded into a bedding chopper, which is a large, high-poweredshredder on wheels. The bedding chopper can make short work of something as thick as a phone book. It has, in fact, feasted on the recycled phone books of many neighboring communities. The chopper is gasoline powered, and uses about as much fuel as a lawn mower orchain saw. 
The ground paper shoots directly from the chopper into a wide groove in the barn floor called the gutter. The gutter runs behind the cows’ stalls to catch their waste. Four hundred and twenty feet of chain lie at the bottom of the gutter. Each morning the chain moves slowly through the gutter, dragging the soiled paper shreds with it. It takes the chain half an hour to make a circuit of the barn. The chain pulls the waste to a chute, where it lands in a manure spreader destined for the Kahls’ cornfields.
"I’ve been ecologically-minded longer than it’s been popular,” says Helen, who also hauls the rinse water from their milk pipeline over to the house, bucket by bucket, to water her flowers, rather than letting it run down the drain. It’s a source of pride for her to get as much use as she can from things. “I hate waste. I hate when something gets dumped into a landfill that I might be able to use.”