Grass biorefinery
The business model
The Biorefinery Grass project is promoting farm-to-farm bioeconomy symbiosis and demonstrate new business models for farmers. The project builds on a strong existing co-operative structure to evaluate new routes to market for cattle farmers, generating additional co-products using small-scale bioeconomy technologies.
For example, using co-op partners to upgrade the protein co-product into a finished and marketable compound feed for chickens and pigs. Farmers are producers and end-users of the products. Grass farmers will get benefit from high resource efficiency from the abundant grass available in the farm and produce products with good market value. The protein produced from the Grass whey can be supplied to the poultry and pig farmers. Symbiosis between grass producers, cattle farmers and pig and poultry farmers will make the supply chain logistics very efficient and ensure locally produced high quality products at low-cost.
An expected benefit of this approach includes a reduction in nitrogen and phosphorous losses (by 25%) and related emissions for the dairy sector by improving nitrogen use efficiency in dairy, whilst simultaneously reducing indirect GHG emissions through substitution of soybean imports for use in monogastric feed. Farmers and farmer co-operatives are the main practitioners involved in the chain.
On-site production in the farm will solve logistics of shipping the feedstock to central location and considering that it is a mobile biorefinery, it can move from one farm to the other, so there is no need for small biorefineries at each farm. This project is mainly focused on making farmers producers of high-quality products from biorefining the grass. This results in 40% increase in usable protein per hectare.
The process
The Biorefinery Grass project will promote farm-to-farm bioeconomy symbiosis and demonstrate new business models for farmers. The process is one that integrates well within existing agriculture system, producing a press-cake feed that is high in resistant protein (nondigested protein) for cattle, while also generating additional high value co-products that can represent an additional revenue source for farmers.
The model has a processing capacity of 2 tons fresh grass per hour. Proteins are the main compounds delivered after the process. They are isolated from grass by mechanical pressing without addition of any chemicals, providing a high-quality product suitable for animal feed. The isolated proteins are further separated in to protein fractions that can be efficiently utilised by ruminants and the crude fraction that can be used in pig and poultry industry.
This approach improves the efficiency of nitrogen use for milk production and allows to provide pigs and chickens with grass protein, an indigenous source of protein concentrate. An expected benefit of improving the nitrogen use efficiency for milk, includes a potential reduction in nitrogen loses and ammonia-related emissions for the dairy (and potentially beef) sector, while indirect emissions from soybean monogastric imports can also be displaced.
An additional value-added co-product in fructo-oligosaccharides (prebiotic sugars) will be extracted from the deproteinized grass whey. It has potential applications for the human and animal nutritional markets. Finally, once the relevant products are extracted, large volumes of nutrient-rich whey can be used as a fertilizer or as a co-substrate for biomethane production through anaerobic digestion.
