Self-made rocket stove at the Ranch
By Tim O’Hara
Ranch Core Team Member
Endeavors to End Propane: Local Fuel Sources and Efficient Cooking Technologies
Cooking food can make it tastier, easier to digest and absorb nutrients, and safer and healthier to eat. Cooking at the Ranch happens multiple times a day, and on some days, pretty continuously throughout the day. We generally have a lot of hungry bellies to fill! Over the decades we have been steadily reducing our use of propane to meet our cooking needs. Propane is a refined product that comes from crude oil or natural gas. The negative environmental impact from its extraction and refinement on communities and the earth are well documented. We have lessened our dependency on this imported product (Costa Rica has few crude oil resources and a moratorium on oil drilling) through the production and use of our own biogas, the utilization of solar cookers, dehydrators, and hay boxes and perhaps most importantly by incorporating efficient wood burning stove technology into our culinary domain.
Our woodshed
Wood is renewable and abundant in and around Mastatal. That’s not to say that wood can’t and isn’t managed poorly in many parts of the world where it is used for cooking. For us, fortunately, we have a plentitude of this resource in a country that does a commendable job of taking care of its timber resources. We have almost limitless supplies of firewood coming from our woodshed, local small-scale bandsaw mills that operate in the region, and our own agroforestry systems.
Common open cook stove
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 3 billion people worldwide still cook using solid fuels such as wood and dung in open fires and on inefficient stoves. Poorly designed stoves and age-old cooking practices can produce high levels of small soot particles and other pollutants that penetrate deep into our lungs. Exposure is particularly high among women who cook indoors and their children resulting in 3.8 million premature deaths a year from pulmonary illnesses. The extensive use of wood for cooking can also contribute severely to deforestation and its associated devastating social and environmental impacts. It can also consume precious and considerable time to gather and haul.
ACE One in action!
These worrisome facts have led us to build and invest in efficient wood burning technologies and food production methods that allow us to sustainably and safely use this local resource to cook with. Our alternative cooking workhorses are our 5 rocket stoves; 3 purchased ACE Ones, and two adobe/cob stoves designed and built in-house. These stoves produce little to no smoke based on a design that features an air intake or fan that produces extreme heat in the combustion chamber that ignites and “burns away” any smoke that is produced. This can be referred to as “complete combustion” and reduces or eliminates soot from the cooking process. The ACE One stoves use small pieces of wood whereas the home-built versions use slightly larger pieces of wood. These efficient stoves burn smaller quantities of wood and produce less or no smoke while retaining the many benefits of cooking with this local and accessible resource.
One of Ranch’s agroforestry systems
When possible, efficient rocket stoves can be coupled with a well-managed agroforestry system that through the extensive planting and pruning of nitrogen-fixing and food producing trees can yield a steady supply of accessible firewood and the food that will be cooked on the rocket stoves. This is yet another example of the closed-loop systems that we oftentimes strive for on our farm.
Adobe rocket stove being built at Ranch
Rocket stoves can be small or large, take many shapes, and can be made from a wide variety of materials. What’s common to all of them is the their ability to efficiently produce extremely hot combustion chambers. To improve performance, your rocket stove chamber can be insulated and your burning surface sized and designed to effectively support your favorite cooking pot. You can even buy rocket stoves for camping these days though if you’re a do-it-yourselfer or on a tight budget, we’d encourage you to design and build your own. There are plans all over the internet.
Our cob oven
In addition to our repertoire of rocket stoves, we have a self-built cob oven that we use for pizza parties and other baking endeavors, 3 Wonderbags, a solar and electric dehydrator and of course our magical biogas stove. We’ll tell you more about these in a future article but in the meantime I’d encourage those that love simple solutions to check out the wonders of the Wonderbag and see how you can help transform a family’s life in Africa while saving a considerable amount of cooking fuel.
Let us know if you have any questions and come and check out are array of alternative cooking technologies if you find yourself in our neighborhood. We love to share our experiences and hope that this has found you well well.
Simple rocket stove being built in community of Mastatal