Low Dust Harvester Incentives Available in 2021

Dust during almond harvest is a problem, but there are incentives to get a low-dust harvesting unit starting next year. Aaron Tarango is a grant program supervisor with the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District

Aaron Tarango is a grant program supervisor with the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution control district

“In 2019, we did a pilot program for low-dust harvesters. We ran a pilot program and see how it works, and what was out there. Did people like it and adhere to it,” said Tarango.

“Have you will kind of liked it, adhere to it. We had funding of $1.6 million on about 29 projects,” added Tarango.

And the incentive is great. The district will pay for half of a self -propelled or a pull behind PTO equipment

And it seems to be everybody liked it. And so what we did was we wrote a grant proposal to USCPA under the targeted air shed grant program. We were actually awarded $10.3 million for that, which is great. So it will allow us to continue this program going forward. We'll begin to wrap the program up and get some applications set up, get a website set up to accept these things. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Uh, well some of the questions we'll get to as well,

Tarago said, there's five units that would qualify for the program now,

“And those are done over kind of a joint venture between us, the Almond Board and NRCS helped pay for a study to see which ones would qualify,” he said.

Durango, mentions the units that would qualify for the major incentive.

“Weiss McNair, Flory, Exact, Jack Rabbit, and the Tenias unit are available. So there's five units that are available for the program,” Tarango said.

Want more information? Call the SJV air pollution control district at559-230-6000.