Dairy Sustainability Award
Dairy Sustainability Award. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
Every day there are new ideas being generated all across the U.S. on how to become more renewable. Good ideas that just need a chance. Bob Joblin, President of Synergy USA and manager of Ag Power Partners says they recently had that chance to prove a good idea for a biodigester.
JOBLIN: We developed the project about 4 years ago and it’s been operating a little over 3 years. And the concept was that dairy farmers needed digesters to help with the manure management program and we worked on ways of making them economically viable without an investment from the dairy farmer. And that’s very important because I think you know the dairy industry is challenged right now for profits.
He says this is where Dean Foods got involved in the project.
JOBLIN: Dean Foods liked it and said we will invest with you one project to prove to the dairy industry that this concept works. They did, we built it and we operated it just the way we said it was going to happen which is pretty unusual unto itself. And then, about the same time Dairy Management, Inc. which is a national association which promotes dairy products became very interested in sustainability.
WalMart and several other companies also expressed interest in sustainability and out of all this interest a series of awards were created. Joblin says their project won the award for renewable energy proving that they did have a good idea.
JOBLIN: I don’t want to sound brag-a-docious but one of the things is “we told you so.” For three years we were out in the woods crying “this will work, this will work” and now somebody acknowledged that “it worked!” From the diary industry side they can say we’re sustainable, we’re committed to sustainability to improve our planet while providing nutritional food and milk. And here’s what we’re doing in our industry.
Joblin talks a little bit about the digester.
JOBLIN: It’s a unique digester that allows us to capture a large quantity of methane from the waste that’s being decomposed in a biological process and with that methane we create electricity, renewable energy that we sell to Idaho Power. It’s enough to provide the power needs of about 900 homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy is pleased to honor the ‘best of the best’ through the U.S. Dairy Sustainability Awards. Nominations are now open to all segments of the U.S. dairy value chain until Nov. 15, 2012. More info at www.usdairy.com
For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
