Commercializing Aquatic Plants

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Aquatic plant company Fyto is helping dairies convert animal waste into a highly productive, protein-rich feed for the dairy industry. Jason Prapas, Fyto CEO and founder, says their next step is to install this closed-loop system on more commercial dairy operations.

Prapas… “There’s a really great circularity to setting up on the operation itself because you’re solving two problems for the dairy producer and you’re solving two problems for Fyto. The two problems for the dairy producer are waste management and feed production - two things that are at least on the top three list of things that dairy farmers worry about on a daily basis. And then for Fyto, we have a feedstock partner, which is, we have our manure which is our fertilizer for our plants and we have an off-taker of the product that we’re growing, so it’s a really synergistic, circular nature of the operation is when we can install on-farm. It’s also true that we can set up near farms and we could have either a pipeline of effluence from these operations, and there’s precedent for this. You’re seeing anaerobic digesters that have pipelines both for the feedstock and for the biogas that they're producing, and I think it’s important to maintain that level of flexibility for now until we see how we can best scale but we’re excited about the opportunity to serve both on-farm and near-farm.”

That’s Fyto’s CEO and founder, Jason Prapas.