Mr. Sala, a Domestic Biogas (BIRU) user, lives in Garege Hamlet, Kassi Village, Rumbia Subdistrict, Jeneponto District, South Sulawesi Province. Mr. Sala came into contact with biogas technology and subsequently encouraged himself to build one while he was participating on a biogas master mason training organized in his village.

This training has been facilitated by the Office of Energy and Mineral Resources of South Sulawesi Province and Hivos in 2016. At the time, resource person and technical personnel was Mr. Jufri, the trainer assistant from Bantaeng District. During the training period, Mr. Jufri also presented various benefits of biogas application to the training participants. Based on such information, Mr. Sala began to develop an interest to be a biogas user.

During the biogas construction phase, one candidate user cancelled his participation due to insufficient area for biogas installation. Mr. Sala sprightly applied to the head of the farmers’ group to replace the previous candidate.

Upon the completion of biogas reactor and the operation of the installation which produces the bio-slurry (biogas sludge), Mr. Sala started to actively apply the bio-slurry as organic fertilizer in his farm land. He became the pioneer in utilizing bio-slurry in his village.

He applies bio-slurry on his shallot crops and chili pepper in an area of 2,000 square meters. The application of bio-slurry for such an area is around 18 sacks, in which each individual sack contains 50 kilograms of solid bio-slurry.

His method of bio-slurry application is that firslty, the shallot crop is grown intermittently with the chili pepper and then applied with solid bio-slurry. Afterward, the land is sprayed with liquid bio-slurry after 15 days of cultivation period.

The 12 kilograms of shallot seedlings are expected to yield 140 kilograms for each harvesting period. Meanwhile, he grew 210 seedlings of chili pepper, in which each individual plant is expected to yield between 5 to 6 kilograms of chili pepper.

After applying a bio-slurry, the growth of the 28-days shallot looks better in comparison with the crops in other farmers’ farm land. The chili pepper tree starts to produce the chili pepper at the age of 50 days.

Mr. Sala’s success in using the bio-slurry becomes the talk of the village, and the news spread to the neighboring village, that is Loka Village, Rumbia Subdistrict, Jeneponto District. One of his family asked him to teach the method of bio-slurry application. Ultimately, the group that learned from him submitted a proposal to the the Office of Energy and Mineral Resources of South Sulawesi Province for an allocation of biogas reactor assistance for the Jeneponto District area.

Additional activity of Mr. Sala other than concentrating on his farming activitis, is that he is still actively involved in building biogas reactor. In 2016, he built 14 units of biogas reactors in Pinrang District and 10 units of biogas reactors in Jeneponto District. In 2017, he built 34 units of biogas reactors in a number of villages and subdistrict in Pinrang District and 5 biogas reactors in Jeneponto District. Mr. Sala and his team has been fervently introducing and socializing the benefits of Domestic Biogas (BIRU) to potential users which have the desire to build a biogas reactor. (Rosmiati Lantara)