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Marysville, WA: Partnership has plans for biogas project By COOKSON BEECHER April 25, 2003
The state closed the farm in 2001, citing the high costs of complying with environmental regulations. For more than a year now, the groups in this partnership — the Tulalip Tribes, the Lower Skykomish River Habitat Conservation Group, Northwest Chinook Recovery and the Washington State Dairy Federation — have been working to find cooperative strategies to preserve the agricultural heritage of the region and to restore salmon runs. As a result of those talks, an agreement was signed on April 11 creating the Snohomish Basin BioGas Partnership. Under the project’s plan, a biogas facility would be created at the prison site that would convert waste from nearby dairies into "green energy" and marketable compost. To do this, the dairy waste would be piped to the site and run through an anaerobic digester. On a technical level, there are already many underground dairy pipes in the area, one of them one-quarter mile from the former prison dairy site. John Sayre, executive director of Northwest Chinook Recovery, said the groups have been told that the bagged biosolids, or compost, offer excellent marketing potential. In addition, some companies are interested in buying "green-tagged" electricity, even though it costs more than electricity produced by conventional methods. Accumulating carbon credits is another plus associated with the project. The liquid that remains after the dairy waste has gone through the biogas process can be piped back to the dairy farms and spread on hayfields. The advantage to this is that there will be no odor. "Odor is a major concern in the dairy industry," Sayre said. "Dairy farmers know that they’ll have to deal with odor issues as more people move into rural areas." Creating "green energy" and marketing the products of the biogas process, which is the first part of the initiative, offers the promise of helping to improve the economic stability of the region’s dairy industry. Under the second part of the initiative, tribes and area farmers will work together to identify important salmon spawning and off-channel habitat and to protect that habitat through acquisition and restoration efforts. Tribal officials and farmers are enthusiastic about the partnership. "This is a historic day," said Herman Williams Jr., chairman of the Tulalip Tribes. "For too long, farmers and tribes have been at loggerheads. We are opening a new chapter in our relationships." Pointing out that fishermen and farmers make their living from the land, Williams said that by working together, "we can ensure that our children can continue the heritage passed on to us by our parents." Andy Werkhoven, a fourth-generation dairy farmer near Monroe, was equally enthusiastic. "The significance of these steps should not be underestimated," he said. "The tribes are not going anywhere, and we are determined to make sure that dairy farming remains an important part of Snohomish County’s economy and culture. Working together, we can help each other — we can restore salmon runs and help the dairy industry." Wiard Groeneveld, dairy farmer and chairman of the Snohomish County Conservation District, agrees. "People can’t believe that the tribes and dairy farmers are working together," he said. "But why should it be any different? The great-grandfathers of area farmers and the great-grandfathers of tribal members worked together when the first white settlers moved to this area. And today, we face common challenges, including sprawl and cheap imports that are squeezing the dairy industry and the fishing industry. It’s our hope that our cooperation will serve as a model for other similar efforts." Last September, chairman Williams and area dairy farmers went to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the state’s congressional delegation. While there, the tribal-dairy delegation also met with high-ranking USDA officials and with developers from the biogas industry. Later this month, representatives of the Tulalip Tribes and local dairy farmers will go to Chino, Calif., to tour a 1-megawatt biogas facility that was recently developed to tackle waste-management issues at a dairy preserve next to some of the growing suburbs of Los Angeles and Riverside, Calif. This is not the first time the closed Monroe dairy facility has attracted interest in the ag community. Several months before the state closed the gates of the honor farm, a group of dairy farmers toured the farm and submitted a proposal to use it to process organic milk. But that plan never took wing, and since then the state has auctioned off the processing equipment at the site. During a typical month, the decades-old facility processed more than 740,000 pounds of milk.
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