In one of my previous lives, when I was working as a small-town newspaper reporter in my early 20s, I lived in Tulare County–where the cows outnumber the people. Whenever I’d be driving home after a weekend away, which was quite often, I always knew I was getting close by the smell.

I had some good times there, learned a ton about being a reporter and then a copy editor, made a bunch of great friends, but let’s just say that when I finally moved back to the Bay Area I didn’t look back.

There was plenty to complain about, but No. 1 on the list was always the cow stench you just couldn’t get away from. Tulare County is a huge dairy area, in case you didn’t know, and let me tell you that when you live there all those jokes about cow flatulence just aren’t funny.

So when I read this article about a dairyman who is using pure Holstein hydrocarbons to fuel two of his delivery trucks, it definitely got my attention. The “emissions” are stored in six lightweight tanks full of compressed bio-methane, where a sleeper compartment would ordinarily be–a small sacrifice to pay, I believe.

“Now we can utilize the dairy’s potential to power our trucks, in addition to generating electricity for our operations,” says Rob Hilarides, owner of Hilarides Dairy in Linsdsay, California. “This will significantly reduce our energy costs and give us some protection from volatile energy prices.”

The project, which debuted at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, this week, is the result of a public-private partnership aimed at encouraging the use of renewable bio-methane produced from the waste of food processing and dairies.

In June 2006, California’s legislature allotted $25 million dollars in grants to encourage the integration of alternative fuels into California’s market.

This technology could eventually power 1 million vehicles. “Across the nation, the benefit to the climate could be as great as taking 16 million cars off the road,” says Allen Dusault, Sustainable Conservation’s director of Sustainable Agriculture.

“In California, the manure is plentiful, the technology is here and public-private partnerships can make this work,” he said. “Biomethane is the only vehicle fuel that is carbon negative. The production process prevents greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere, and the resulting fuel is clean burning.”

The process of converting cow manure into usable gas involves flushing manure from the cows’ stalls into a covered lagoon where bacteria convert the manure to bio-gas. Then the trapped gas is sent from the lagoon to a bio-gas upgrading system to remove impurities; the pressurized bio-methane is then put into the truck’s fuel tank.

Hmm, I wonder if this whole process will help or hurt the region’s stink problem. Either way, this is a pretty great idea for minimizing pollution and diversifying energy sources.

Forget horsepower, the future of powering motor vehicles could just come from cows.