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Farmers and Distillers Come Together to Create Innovative Biofuel Using Dairy
In partnership with: Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development
Vodka is a great way to bring people together, Omid McDonald says, and it couldn’t be more true in the quest to make the dairy industry more sustainable. As the founder of Dairy Distillery, his company has teamed up with dairy farmers in the Great Lakes region to turn a common dairy byproduct into biofuel.
Dairy Distillery, based in Ontario, Canada, had been using milk permeate to create a creamy vodka, affectionately named Vodkow. Meanwhile, the Michigan Milk Producers Association was churning out 14,000 tons of permeate each year from its Constantine facility and turning it into low-value animal feed. But what if they could find a better use for the permeate?
Crossing international borders and coming together from seemingly incompatible industries, the MMPA and Dairy Distillery wanted to see if they could instead use the permeate to make an
eco-friendlier biofuel.
For Joe Diglio, president and CEO of the MMPA, this is about “a few organizations coming together to serve not just the dairy industry but the betterment of the environments that we all live in.”
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Milking Success
They shared their idea with the state of Michigan, which granted them $2.6 million in funding from the Michigan Strategic Fund and a $100,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The results were exciting. After conferring with wastewater experts, carbon accountants and others who could vet the idea, the MMPA found that a new plant will be able to turn the milk permeate into 2.2 million gallons of ethanol, reducing the facility’s carbon footprint by 5%, or 14,500 tons of carbon, each year.
“Their ability to create this joint venture and take their waste stream, utilize it for another product and solve their wastewater issue is really incredible,” says Jodi Gruner, MDARD economic development specialist. “It’s like winning the lottery for them.”
The inspiration for the project was not entirely original, McDonald admits. It stemmed from New Zealand, where farmers were converting their byproducts into energy in the 1970s during the oil crisis.
“Great ideas are often done in the past and then forgotten,” McDonald says. “People are looking at everything from the lens of carbon reduction, and that’s really the driving force on this product. Something old has been made new again with a different purpose.”