Sustainable Business Practices In The Skagit Valley

The Skagit Valley is one of the most prosperous growing regions in the United States, as a local business who draws on that land to provide grain, we believe it is imperative to protect and improve our home. One of our main goals has been to return value back to the Valley by malting local barley to sell to breweries along the West Coast. One of the most important things we can do as a business in Skagit is to be active stewards of the land and proponents for Skagit farmers. By growing and malting grain here in the Valley we are keeping the value here, where it needs to be, unlike commodity systems that are set on extracting value from agricultural regions. 

This year we have worked hard studying and setting bold sustainability goals that will guide our company and inform all of our decisions in the future. We directed our efforts at improving the impact of our own operations through more responsible production by upcycling waste and our commitment to climate action by transitioning to renewable energy.  

Our bold goal of achieving zero waste in our production facility means we are working to divert as much of it as possible from ending up in landfills. This requires a perspective shift in the way we think about waste and urges us to find the highest-value use for these materials. Upcycling means putting these materials back to work instead of burying them in a landfill. Luckily the majority of our byproducts are organic and much of them are even edible which makes upcycling much more impactful.

The edible byproducts we create and collect throughout malting our undersized and cracked kernels and then rootlets from germination. While feeding people should always be a priority, animal feed is the next best option. We are striving for consistency in our products so that means the raw grains that don’t meet malting quality standards are sold to local farmers in the Skagit Valley as a feed supplement for cows and pigs.  We have also worked with a farmer on a pilot project to make animal feed pellets out of our protein-packed rootlets. These rootlets grow during germination and then are separated during the kilning and polishing of the grain. The nutritional profile and flavor of these rootlets for food applications are encouraging, but we need to build new systems in order to grow this pilot to scale. 

For now, most of the rootlets end up going to a network of anaerobic farm digesters with the remainder of our inedible organic materials left over from harvest. The stems, loose hulls, dust, weeds, and grain dust make an excellent input for the anaerobic digesters to extract renewable energy and produce compost. Most of these digesters help dairy farmers manage large quantities of cow manure that would otherwise emit strong greenhouse gases like methane which is eighty-four times more potent than carbon dioxide. They are able to capture this methane to generate renewable power from the decomposition of organic material with the help of anaerobic microbes that don’t use air to live.

We are working on building these relationships with local businesses to add value to these by-products and create more systems for upcycling. Our latest partnership is centered around building a composting program with an organic farm incubator for new farmers just two miles down the road from the malthouse. This composting program will provide their fields with nutritious soil building compost that will grow healthier and tastier crops.

Our biggest sustainability achievement has been our impact on climate action by transitioning to all renewable electricity! Malting is an energy-intensive process with demands for sustained heat and steady airflow. The energy used to power the process is derived from natural gas and electricity which both can be sources of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. We buy the majority of our electricity through our utility who produces it from both renewable and fossil fuel generation. About 60% of it was coming from burning coal and neutral gas, but we wanted to move from 40% to 100% renewable energy as soon as possible. Last month we made a big change by converting all of our purchased electricity to Puget Sound Energy’s Green Power Program.

Purchasing renewable energy is tied up with how the US power grid functions. The grid is an open and interconnected system with producers generating energy and consumers using the energy. All emissions occur at the producer’s site of generation and then that fossil fuel energy flows into the grid to mix with all the other available energy. This means our consumption has to be matched to an equal amount of renewable production to ensure we are meeting our goal every month.

Matching neutralizes emissions, but it doesn’t significantly move the needle in achieving a completely renewable grid. We need to be making additive (meaning new) investments in building and expanding renewable generation sites by installing our own or enrolling in solutions like Puget Sound Energy’s Power Program. These additive sites are beginning to churn out more renewable energy to replace and dilute the outdated fossil-fuel generated energy that is emitting harmful and imbalanced levels of greenhouse gasses. 

Presently the only way to use all renewable energy is to be both a producer and a consumer by generating and using it on-site (such as with rooftop solar panels). We are exploring the cost of making an investment to possibly build our own solar array at some point in the future as part of Sustainable Connection’s North Puget Sound Solarize and are encouraged by the increasing affordability and effectiveness of solar offerings. 

Future Sustainability Goals

SVM is excited to continue to explore and work on our sustainability goals next year and into the future. We are especially excited to be able to offer Salmon-Safe certified grain to our customers as well as many organic grains. Sustainability has become a part of our mission and ethos, perhaps it is because of our connection to the Skagit Valley and a result of seeing what it takes to make an agricultural region viable. The Valley is our home and we believe we can have a positive impact on the future prosperity of this land for generations to come.