By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
An $80 million USDA grant will be used to enhance environmental agricultural practices in northern Missouri and southern Iowa.
Roeslein Alternative Energy of Unionville applied for the grant with help from Iowa State University. Brandon Butler with Roeslein says the company has been capturing energy from livestock waste since its beginning in 2012.
“We’ve got close to a hundred lagoons covered,” Butler says. “So, if you’re one of those people scratching their head, wondering why don’t I smell those hog farms nearly as much as I used to, well that’s because Roeslein has come in and tarped over all of those lagoons and we capture all those gases.”
Butler says those captured gases can be turned into energy.
“We’re able to, again, tarp over those lagoons, captured all of those gases, bring them to a centralized gas purification skid that we manufacture and we separate those molecules,” Butler says. “We upgrade the methane into natural gas called renewable natural gas or RNG and we directly inject that into the natural gas grid.”
Butler says sustainable agriculture holds great promise for the rural economy.
“The biogas is really, really important to rural America and agricultural communities, because this is really our chance to interact with this extreme push towards a more sustainable future,” according to Butler.
The $80 million USDA grant will be matched with $4.7 million in local funds. It will provide financial incentives for farmers to plant prairie grasses and cover crops in marginal fields to be harvested and converted into biogas and biofertilizer.
Butler says Roeslein has a simple goal.
“We want to create processes that are good economically, they’re good environmentally, and they’re good for wildlife. Because when it’s good for wildlife, it’s good for us as well,” according to Butler.
The northern Missouri/southern Iowa projects is part of the $3.1 billion Climate-Smart Commodities Projects financed by the USDA.