Today's Butter Is Tomorrow's Energy

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Today marks the grand opening of the Pennsylvania Farm Show. For the next week, visitors will inhale milk shakes, fried mushrooms, potato doughnuts and cheese; and take in animals, machinery displays, and politicians looking at things.
What does the Farm Show have to do with energy, you ask? Pennsylvania Public Radio’s Mary Wilson, who covered the unveiling of this year’s butter sculpture, explains over at State House Sound Bites:

The thousand-pound butter sculpture sits between exhibits for Pennsylvania honey and local apples. It depicts a boy leading a calf on a rope at the county fair.
…Jim Victor of Montgomery County made the sculpture. A release from the Department of Agriculture informs us he also sculpts chocolate and cheese. His butter masterpiece is but a temporary monument: at the end of the Farm Show, it will be converted to 65 kilowatt hours of electricity at a Juniata County farm.

We’re not quite sure how butter is converted into electricity  – do you know? If so, explain in the comments – but we’ll figure it out and post an update later this week. In the meantime, here’s the full Farm Show schedule.

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