Diversity for Food Business

Diversity for Food Business. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

Mark Smith saw a need and filled it. And by making that conscious decision has opened new doors for his existing business.

SMITH: Our normal business is we produce dried fruit, blueberries, strawberries, apples, products like that. We’re a food company. In the processing we were coming up with waste streams that were not of the quality we wanted to sell and so we were looking for something other than having to go pay a landfill on our waste material, find something that we could do that would be useful.

Smith is the owner of Summit Foods in Oregon and that necessity turned into a fuel source as Smith has begun producing ethanol fuel from not only his waste products but now other company’s waste materials.

SMITH: It’s a win situation for everybody. We’re helping them with a landfill problem and we’re producing energy from products that was just going to dumps, we sell it as fuel. The gas companies bring a tanker and we load it out and it goes right to cars. Everything we’ve sold so far is E85 so we just blend 15% gas in with our product and then we make a ready to use fuel.

A lot of thought and a considerable investment went into the decision to branch into this part of the business.

SMITH: We’re not a big company; we’re a family company here. Our busy season is in the winter when people eat dried fruit so we were looking for something to smooth out and something that would compliment what we are doing and ethanol really it’s the right product for us. As far as the investment, it was a huge investment for a company like ours and not only an investment in money but in terms of a lot of learning.

Smith says there was also a considerable paper trail they had to follow and as far as the pay off, he says he really doesn’t know but it is important for people to take what steps they can to help.

SMITH: I think people need to look at what’s a good fit for their company. I would say that there is room for regional companies like ourselves and it makes sense. But it takes a tremendous amount of feed stock to make the ethanol so is there going to one on every corner, I don’t think so.

For additional information on clean energy and the upcoming clean energy conference, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

www.harvestcleanenergy.org