An Italian farm-cum-museum shows how there is nothing such as waste

Italy’s “Shit Museum” has the whiff of success about it: here in Castelbosco, farmers are transforming sloppy cowpats into plates you can eat off.

Once upon a time there was a large farm about a hundred kilometres south of Milan. The farmer had not only hundreds of cows, but veritable mountains of excrement — stinking slops he thought he could do something with.

“The idea came from the need to take advantage of animal dung in an ecological way,” Gianantonio Locatelli, 61, a farmer, said. Over his various farms, 3,500 cattle produce 55 tonnes of milk a day to make Grana Padano, a hard cheese comparable to Parmigiano Reggiano. They also generate 150 tonnes of waste.

Rather than wallow in it, Mr. Locatelli came up with an ingenious way to make use of the pungent matter. The excrement is collected into stool digesters, immense vats where bacteria transform everything organic into methane. The methane is then burned to produce electricity. The daily faeces output produces three Megawatts an hour, enough to turn on the lights of a village of 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants.

Baked material

The water used to cool the engines heats to 100 degrees Celsius, which is then used to warm the farm, stables and digesters. But the most sophisticated stool success is the line of tableware created out of the left-over faeces, dubbed “merdacotta” — literally “baked shit”, a play on the clay-based earthenware Terracotta. The recipe? Cow dung mixed with Tuscan clay and rounded off with “a little secret touch” — a formula Locatelli fiercely protects.

The museum, founded on one of the farms in 2005, has bricks, hexagonal and rectangular tiles, flowerpots, plates or jars, among other artworks. Designed with the architect Luca Cipelletti, it aims to capture the philosophy of an art-loving farmer who studied agriculture in Canada and rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol in New York before becoming an amateur collector of conceptual works.

The Merdacotta collection won a prize at Milan’s design fair last year, justifying his bet to “turn shit into something graceful,” he says.