Can a dairy become its own energy company?

Ask most dairy leaders to name their biggest uncontrolled cost after milk, and energy is close to the top. Ask them who their energy company is, and the answer is always someone else. More from Milk exists to challenge exactly this kind of settled assumption, and few are more worth challenging than the idea that a dairy can only ever buy energy, never make it.

From liability to feedstock

Every dairy generates organic streams it currently pays to remove: high-strength effluent, sludge, out-of-spec product, and on integrated sites, farm manure and slurry. Anaerobic digestion treats those streams as feedstock rather than liability. Bacteria break them down in the absence of oxygen to produce biogas, which can be burned for heat and power or upgraded to biomethane and injected into the gas grid. What remains, digestate, is a nutrient-rich material that can displace bought-in fertiliser.

The UK regulatory scaffolding for this already exists. GOV.UK publishes standard rules for anaerobic digestion facilities covering biogas, biomethane and digestate, which means the pathway is a permitting exercise, not a legal frontier. The technology is proven at farm and factory scale. What remains contested is the commercial model.

Published by The Dairy Mail, Dairy Connect: https://www.dairy-connect.com/the-dairy-mail/can-a-dairy-become-its-own-energy-company/