Soy Efficiency

Talk about save the planet, sustainability, efficiency, you name it, Washakie Renewable Energy is opening its Plymouth, Utah biodiesel plant soon and I talked with Jeff Peterson, government affairs director. I was absolutely amazed to hear the plans that Washakie has for using soy beans and canola seeds from Northwest farmers. They crush the beans and seeds, extract the oil mechanically and the residue? Here's Jeff. "We also do a lot of just recycled cooking oil and you can use other things but it really is the soy oil. You get a better product at the end and you have a really high energy yield from that. the way that our crush plant will be set up is that we will be able to extract approximately 80% of the oil and 20% will stay in the bean. We are going to use a mechanical, compression-based crusher so there will be no chemicals or anything else used to extract that oil. When we are finished we will have a very high quality crushed soy meal that we will then sell back to farmers as feedstock for their livestock. That means almost 100% use of that soybean. Yes, in fact, the protein part of it, you lose very little of the protein value of the soybean itself through the crushing. All we are taking out is some of that oil and there is a fairly significant amount of that oil that stays in the bean and so you take that crushed soy or canola and you can feed it to dairy cows, chickens or whatever.