[Digestion] Bio Slurry

Kyle Schutter kyle at takamotobiogas.com
Tue Apr 16 00:44:22 CDT 2013


Hi List,

At our company we have recently realized that the value of the bioslurry (we call it biofertilizer) may be greater than the value of the biogas itself. I wanted to pick your brains on how it can be monetized. This would be good for the farmer and for the biogas company. If the farmer can see a new income source from biogas and not just a money saver, that could be huge.

There is the current way of using bioslurry.
The farmer puts it on their own crops. This is usually done in a non-systematic, non-optimized way such that the farmer can't get the full value of it. For our farmers, they typically have more bioslurry than they can use.

We could sell the bioslurry to large farms.
On the surface, this seemed the be the most attractive way to monetize bioslurry because the margins between what a small farmer is willing to sell their bioslurry for and what the large farmers pay for fertilizer is something like 500%. However, most (if not all) export farms want non-animal based fertilizer as they export to the European market and presumably the European customers do not accept crops (even flowers) that have been grown on manure. There are also large farms in Kenya that grow for the local market, so those might be the best target for now.

We could sell the bioslurry to urban households for landscaping.
Rich households in Nairobi have beautiful gardens they need to take care of. The market is limited, but probably big enough for us.

Another Idea is to sell a foliage spray.
I don't know much about this, but someone suggested that if we separated the solids from the liquid of the bioslurry this could be a good product.

We could add value to the bioslurry by growing a crop on it and selling that.
Instead of selling the bioslurry we could sell a crop that grows on the bioslurry. In this case we either collect the slurry for our own farm or we can teach our farmers how to grow a cash crop (such as tomatoes, mushrooms, berries) and then do a weekly pick up from them. This is logistically and training wise the most difficult and also the most profitable. I would shy away from this monetization method for now.

I know that SKGSangha has taught their farmers how to do vermicomposting which would be interesting for us. In our case we are a Company not an NGO so we need to get part of the revenue stream. Also there is no small scale market for organic fertilizer in Kenya. Only large farms buy organic fertilizer/compost/soil amendment in Kenya. So we could buy the vermicompost off of our farmers and sell it to large farms.

We are talking about 5,000 tons of bioslurry a month that we need to find a home for. Let me know what you all think we should do.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Kyle
Founder and Director of Technology
Schutter Energy Ltd.
+254 703113383
www.takamotobiogas.com



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