Dairy industry sustainability award program celebrates 10th anniversary

Hear from two guests in this commemorative podcast. The first guest is Karen Scanlon. She is the executive vice president for environmental stewardship for the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. She’ll talk about the purpose of the center’s annual sustainability awards and the process that goes into selecting the winners. This year is the 10th anniversary of the awards program, so she also explains how the awards are evolving and recaps some of the projects that have won in the past. The second guest is Chase Goodrich of Goodrich Family Farm in Salisbury, Vermont. Chase and his sister, Danielle, manage their family farm. It is one of several dairy farmer sustainability award winners this year. The farm has a 1.32-million-gallon anaerobic digester that produces renewable natural gas (RNG) from cow manure and food waste. It is one of the largest anaerobic digesters in the U.S. The digester is a partnership that brings together Goodrich Farm, Vanguard Renewables (developer, owner and operator of the digester), Vermont Gas Systems and Middlebury College, which will purchase much of the RNG produced at the digester.