How small can on-farm co-digestion economically go?
Anaerobic digestion of dairy manure produces energy and digestate fertilizer, while providing several benefits to advance dairy and societal sustainability. Co-digestion of dairy manure with food waste is an opportunity to generate even more energy for local regions while recycling the nutrients in the food waste in addition to the manure. Because of the enhanced value that co-digestion can bring, systems at small to medium sized dairy operations can achieve economic feasibility. This fact sheet highlights the economic feasibility investigation of multiple sized dairy farm operations with different levels of food waste co-digestion, which illustrated that dairies with 300 lactating cows or more could achieve an economically viable project with moderate revenue values (from energy production, digestate fertilizer, food waste recycling, and GHG reduction) and approximately half manure and half food waste as the digester feedstocks. Increasing project size enables economic feasibility with lower levels of food waste to manure ratios.