June 28, 2024. State and local leaders cut the ribbon yesterday on a new renewable energy facility at Lent Hill Dairy Farm in Steuben County. The new plant will make clean power from cow manure and discarded food waste from nearby cheese and yogurt-making plants. The manure and food scraps will be anaerobically digested to create biogas, then converted to electricity in a high-efficiency generator at the Lent Hill farm and added to the NYSEG grid.
More than 35,000 gallons of food waste and about 90,000 gallons of manure will be recycled per day at the facility and converted to about eight million kilowatt hours of renewable electricity annually. The electricity will be used by the Chobani yogurt company and Winsor Acres, a dairy farm, who have partnered to off-take the renewable energy via NYSEG.
Leaders on hand to celebrate the new facility included New York Senator Tom O’Mara; state Assemblywoman Marjorie Byrnes; Brian Murray, USDA’s Director of Rural Development for New York; Kelly Fitzpatrick, Chair of the Steuben County Legislature; Judy Hall, Cohocton Supervisor; James C. Johnson, Executive Director Steuben County Industrial Development Agency; Sally Rowland, of the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Division of Materials Management; Brett Green of Martin Construction Resource; and Patrick Serfass, Executive Director of the American Biogas Council, among others.
Martin Construction Resource (MCR) provided the project’s engineering, procurement and construction, hiring local contractors such as Dickson Environmental and Bouille Electric.
Patrick Serfass, Executive Director of the American Biogas Council, said, “Biogas systems like Lent Hill Dairy’s not only provide clean electricity for businesses, they also capture methane emissions to displace fossil fuels, displace synthetic fertilizers with natural nutrients already on the farm, and provide economic investment in rural communities. Today, only one in 10 New York dairy farms have increased their sustainability this way, so a lot more opportunity to help the environment and economy remains.”