By Stephanie Hoff
On the farm, ingenuity is the name of the game. Farmers are self-starters, entrepreneurs, and jacks of all trades. Those attributes are seen in the marketplace, too, as growers solve problems to bring more value to their businesses.
Tom Verry is the director of outreach and development with Clean Fuels Alliance America. He’s been promoting biodiesel with soybean farmers even before Clean Fuels began. Verry says a lot of success has come from trial and error.
He recalls a humorous example of experimentation. Verry remembers, several decades ago, using a soybean oil byproduct to spray gravel roads to reduce dust.
“Sometimes it’d work, it’d set up perfectly, just like a nice oiled road. Sometimes it just never set up and was just a mess,” he laughs. “It had a pretty rough smell to it. We did find the dogs liked it a lot. They would come out and lick the rocks. We did some roads North of Columbia, Missouri, and it didn’t work very well, so for about three days, we were the story. People were calling in to news radio stations, ‘can you spray it in front of my house to keep my mother-in-law away?’”
While he looks back on that experiment with humor, Verry says it just shows that soybean farmers are always looking to innovate — not everything is going to be a home run — but growers have a good track record with biodiesel development and soy foam, for example.
Verry says the farmers had the long-term vision and commitment so that if they made a mistake, they could back up and try again to reach success. He says there was no book on how to commercialize a fuel like biodiesel — the soybean farmers made it happen.
“When we started this, I think diesel at the rack was 80 cents a gallon. Biodiesel, soy diesel, was $6 a gallon. But the farmers saw this is what we needed,” he says. “Today, the market wants a low-carbon, low-cost fuel. Biodiesel is it.”
Verry says he and his wife used to advertise biodiesel by the gallon jug at tractor pulls and fairs. Today, PepsiCo and other national fleets are running on B100.
