From Poop to Power

The Big Sky Dairy, a Dean Foods Cos. farm near Gooding, Idaho, is making plans for their animal waste — energy for the local power grid.

The 4,700 dairy cows that live at the dairy make plenty of animal waste (and methane) every day. Dean Foods will use that waste to generate electricity, using an anaerobic digester currently under development. The digester will capture and convert the cows’ methane into over a megawatt of electricity. The main by-product will be a fiber that can be used to enhance soil or clean animal bedding.

Dean Foods is one of the largest dairy processors in the world — encompassing a number of brands:

• Adohr Farms
• AltaDena
• Barbe's
• Barber's
• Berkeley Farms
• Borden
• Broughton Foods Company
• Brown's Dairy
• Celta
• Country Delite
• Country Fresh
• Creamland
• Dairy Ease
• Dairy Fresh
• Dean Foods Ultra
• Gandy's
• Garelick Farms
• Horizon Organic
• Hygeia
• Ideal Dairy
• Jilbert's Dairy
• Lehigh Valley Dairies
• Liberty Dairy
• Louis Trauth
• Mayfield Dairy
• McArthur Dairy
• Meadow Brook
• Meadow Gold
• Model Dairy
• Oak Farms
• PET Evaporated Milk
• Price's
• Purity
• Reiter
• Robinson Dairy
• Schenkel's
• Schepps
• Shenandoah's Pride
• Swiss Farms
• T.G. Lee
• Tuscan Dairy Farms
• Verifine

And, if you’re picking up either Land O’Lakes or Hershey products, you may be using Dean Foods as well.

While Dean Foods is only in the process of implementing their planned anaerobic digester at one of their plants, it may be enough to convince them to do the same at the more than 100 other plants that the company operates. Think of the sheer number of cows Dean Foods must own — and think about the methane gas coming from just those cows alone. If Dean Foods finds that a greener dairy is better for business — which, considering that they expect to have enough energy at the Big Sky Dairy that they can supply at least part of the local energy grid — any high level of implementation at the rest of their dairies will make for an impressive reduction in greenhouse gases. Gregg Engles, the Chairman and CEO of Dean Foods, has described the Big Sky Dairy as the pilot project for this program. It will be worthwhile to see how the project progresses.

The digester is expected to be operational by early 2009. Dean Foods is getting some help on the development side by AgPowers Partners, which is a partnership between the patent-holder of the anaerobic digester (GHD, Inc.), the manufacturer (Andgar Corporation) and an energy company (Cenergy USA, Inc.). GHD has installed 30 similar systems since 1999 and was covered in-depth in March.

Photo by Law Keven