Visalia dairy getting $3 million to convert manure into power
The California Department of Food and Agriculture will award nearly $11.1 million to help pay to build five anaerobic digesters in the Central Valley, including one west of Visalia.
AgPower Visalia, LLC, a partnership that includes the Moonlight Dairy near Visalia, will receive $3 million to put toward the digester that will be built on the dairy. CDFA officials said the partnership will have to put up $4.7 million in matching funds for the project.
The grant is coming from Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is being funded by the CDFA and other state agencies that are investing money from California’s Cap-and-Trade Program auctions, in which businesses bid to buy allowances for greenhouse gas emissions.
“These projects demonstrate a commitment by California to support efforts by dairy farmers to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gases from the agriculture sector,” CDFA Secretary Karen Ross said in a written statement. “This is definitely a win-win for agriculture: cutting methane emissions and improving the environment while also generating revenue from renewable bioenergy.”
“The numbers are hard to make it work without grant money available,” John Moon, owner of Moonlight Dairy, said, explaining that he and his partners might not be able to afford to build the digested without financial assistance.
“It’s all about reducing greenhouse gasses and capture the methane in the air,” he said.
A dairy anaerobic digester works by pushing manure through a series of chambers over several days, during which a combination of heat and the actions of bacteria break it down.
This produces methane that can be captured — rather than wafting into the air — and in this case it would be used to fuel a generator. The electricity from it would be sold to an electric utility and put back on the grid, Moon explained.
Some solid waste that isn’t fully broken down can be used on the dairy as cow bedding and for other purposes, while the liquid waste remaining will be used to water and fertilize the dairy’s corn and wheat crops, he said.
Moon said his partners include Washington-based Andgar Corp., which has built several anaerobic digesters, including one at the Calgren Renewable Fuels plant in Pixley.
The Moonlight Dairy plant will be able to process about 100,000 gallons of cow manure a day, said Mike Apol, regional manager for Regenis, a division of Andgar.
The other recipients of the CDFA grants each will receive between $973,430 to $3 million.
Those others are Philip Verwey Farms in Kings County; Open Sky Ranch, Inc. in Riverdale; Philip Verwey Farms in Madera; and West-Star North Dairy Biogas in Buttonwillow.
They and Moonlight Dairy will have to provide a total of $18.9 million in matching funds to put toward their projects.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, trapping more than 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide over a short-term — 20-year — period, the CDFA reports.
“These dairy digester projects support California’s efforts to reduce methane and other short-lived climate pollutants, helping meet the state’s goal of reducing greenhouse gases to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, as recently called for by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.,” the agency states in a press release.
Visit CDFA’s dairy digester website, www.cdfa.ca.gov/go/dd, for more information.
— David Castellon