04/18/09 Building Biomass

Building Biomass. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Getting ready for an oil free future is taking shape all around the country with numerous projects like the one in the Sunnyside, Washington area. Ted Durfey is President of Natural Selection Farms in Sunnyside who works on a number of different projects. DURFEY: We do a variety of things with handling biosolids, land management for biosolids applications as well as providing the permitting and the connection between the farmers and the municipalities and through that process we've developed a composting site. In addition to composting, we've gone to a planting of canola because canola extracts the nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur from the biosolids. Durfey was a recipient of a USDA Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency grant or 9006 funds for a biomass project. DURFEY: The grant itself is very fundamental in getting equipment up or getting it established. It's an investment from the state's standpoint into what we're doing. Our facility cost over a million dollars to build and so getting additional funding into it was very instrumental. He suggests looking at all the possible funding options to help open other doors. DURFEY: The other thing that we work with is the low energy freedom loan that we received from the state which has been very instrumental in us being able to go out and purchase seed and those seed purchases of course are 80% of our operational cost and it's allowed us the ability to expand into markets besides what's here locally to be able to purchase that seed and crush it and run it through the facility. Getting a 9006 grant is really not all that difficult according to Durfey but paperwork is the most important part in securing the dollars. DURFEY: We worked with the WSDA on putting that together and actually the grant itself was not all that difficult. There is paperwork that is associated with it and follow up paperwork as to the process of assurance to the state that what we're doing is in compliance with their regulations but also so that they have assurance that we were to follow through with the money once we received it. People have to understand that we are eventually going to have to move toward alternative fuels/ For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org