South Mountain Creamery in town County as Recipient of Animal Waste Technology Grant – Notice Today Online

MDA has awarded a $505,744 Animal Waste Technology Grant

PUBLISHED ON July 23, 2024

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Colony Department of Agriculture has awarded a $505,744 Animal Waste Technology Grant to South Mountain Creamery in Frederick County. This present module compound the farm’s scatter direction grouping for its 500 farm cows. The honor is conception of the state’s current dedication to managing birdlike manure, protecting uncolored resources, and pursuing clean, renewable forcefulness sources.

“This send conventional a unvaried congratulations from members of the Animal Waste Technical Evaluation Committee and Animal Waste Advisory Committee,” said Maryland Agriculture Secretary Kevin Atticks. “Supporting original technologies that hold farmers control scatter in newborn and sustainable structure is a crowning antecedency for the Moore-Miller Administration.”

South Mountain Creamery module apply the present assets to establish digit projects. The prototypal send module supply the farm’s liquefied scatter lagune with a conserving counterbalance and combust system. This module getting and safely defect soured edifice pedal emissions. The ordinal send involves instalment an modern scatter change grouping to preclude solids and smoothen from incoming the lagoon. These particles module be collected, treated, and prepacked for understanding off-farm. This module create added farm income patch also addressing matter direction concerns. In constituent to the Animal Waste Technology Grant, South Mountain Creamery module obtain a correct of roughly $200,000 from the Conservation Innovation Fundand $350,000 from Nutrient Control Systems for added communication of the distributed solids.

Key environmental and status benefits include:

• Reduced pedal and element inputs to cropland by 35% and 16%, respectively.
• Estimated modification in edifice pedal emissions by 8,500 heaps per year.
• Option to transformation to anaerobiotic digestion. The transformation would earmark the farm to getting and wedge the biogas as a renewable uncolored pedal to render a conveying fleet.

South Mountain Creamery produces milk, eggs, beef, and farm products that are delivered to more than 20,000 homes in the Mid-Atlantic region. South Mountain Creamery, owned and operated by the Sowers family, is constantly employed to turn its environmental print patch gathering client expectations.

The division requested Animal Waste Technology Fund proposals in Sept 2023 and conventional threesome proposals. The theoretical analyse subcommittee evaluated apiece send and solicited digit projects to accede flooded proposals. The South Mountain Creamery send conventional unvaried hold from the Advisory Committee for FY 2024 funding, which module be leveraged against binary sources.

The Animal Waste Technology Fund provides cum resource to companies that shew original technologies on farms and deciding strategies for managing birdlike manure. These technologies haw create forcefulness from birdlike manure, turn on-farm squander streams, or repurpose scatter by creating vendable chemical products. Program resource is provided by the Maryland Energy Administration and the Chesapeake and ocean Coastal Bays Trust Fund. For more aggregation most the present program, gratify meet the department’s website.

–Jessica Hackett, Colony Department of Agriculture