One Moos and One Hums, but They Could Help Power Google

America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centres of companies like Google and Microsoft. While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centres in more rural locales, and dairy farmers’ efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel. With the right skills, a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years, Hewlett-Packard engineers say in a research paper to be made public on Wednesday