A SPECIAL PRODUCERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ® C A L I F O R N I A Dairy & Livestock ®
Jack de Jong of River Ranch Farms in Hanford checks on some the dairy’s 5,600 Holstein cows. Their manure helps produce energy, which is purchased by Southern California Gas Co.
Dairy farms fight pollution, turn manure into cash
By LisaMcEwen Managing manure is nothing new for dairy operators. After all, cows and their four-chambered stomachs are one of nature’s best examples of efficient digestion. But these days, those bovine digestive systems are generating a newsource of income for nearly 200 dairies in California. At his River Ranch Farms in Hanford, Jack de Jong now counts on the thousands of gallons of milk his 5,600Holstein cows produce each day and the thousands of pounds of manure they excrete. Each product is important to his bottom line. While his milk is turned into a variety of dairy products at the nearby Land O’ Lakes cooperative in Tulare, River Ranch Farms’ other commodity is flushed from its two milking barns. The cow droppings take a systematic journey across the 2,100-acre dairy. They go fromamanure separator to aweepingwall and eventually land in a large, rubber-covered anaerobic digester. Bacteria break down the manure solids, and emissions that would normally escape into the atmosphere are captured. The biogas byproduct, methane, is an energy-rich fuel. It is deposited in a pipeline that runs beneath the dairy to a biogas cleaning hub a fewmiles away. The hub, funded in part by a grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture Dairy Digester Research and Development Program, is owned by a part- nership of dairies andMaas EnergyWorks, a digester developer, operating as Lakeside
Pipeline LLC. It is already collectingmethane from five dairies and can accommodate three more, for a total of 33,500 cows, de Jong said. “Historically, I’ve entertained the idea of makingmoney frommanure, and initially, I was not excited,” de Jong said. “There has been hesitancy getting to this point, but as understanding of the situation increases, so does the comfort level.” The gas leaves the digester at about 65% to 67%methane, but once it cycles through the hub, methane percentage reaches 98%, de Jong said. The methane is purchased by Southern California Gas Co. It enters its pipeline and is used to power a variety of renewable natural gas projects such as fueling fleets of trucks or buses. Carbon credits earned by the dairies are shared by the gas company andMaas Energy Works. Managingmanure has takenon greater urgency in the past several yearswithpassage of Senate Bill 1383, legislation in 2016 aimed at curbing pollution frommethane. As a result, the California Air Resources Board implemented strategies to reduce emissions fromdairy manure by 40% by 2030. To accomplish this, the state has incentivized the process of capturing manure’s release of methane with competitive grants through its dairy digester research effort and its Alternative Manure Management Program. These efforts recently gained traction as important steps in battling climate change and providing business
See MANURE, Page 18
March 23, 2022 Ag Alert 17
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