The Press Democrat
Photo Courtesy of Beth Schlanker/The Press Democrat
By Austin Murphy
In his dungarees and rubber boots, Albert Straus looked every bit the dairy farmer that he is. On this particular morning, however, the 66-year-old founder and CEO of Straus Family Creamery was some 25 miles from his family farm.
Straus stood on the floor of a processing plant, amid gleaming silver tanks and conveyor belts that would soon begin moving hundreds of the company’s iconic glass bottles of milk with cream on top.
PETALUMA, Calif. — The cows had to be deterred from messing with the
experiment.
Researchers from a Bay Area technology company had come to the sprawling
dairy farm north of San Francisco to test an emerging solution to planetwarming emissions: microscopic pink organisms that eat methane, a potent
greenhouse gas.
Kenny Correia, 35, of Correia Family Dairy, watched the team from Windfall Bio
working near the lagoons used to store manure from the farm’s several hundred
cows. The researchers erected a futuristic system of vats, pipes, tubes and shiny
metal supports. Then, when everything was assembled, they poured pink liquid
into one of the vats. “They were looking like mad scientists out there,” Correia
recounted.
He acknowledged initially thinking it was a “crazy idea” to integrate an outdoor
laboratory into a working farm. There was the potential for the cows to “be all
over it — licking it, pulling out wires and scratching on it,” he said.
But livestock farms are a significant source of methane emissions, and Windfall
wanted to see how much the microbes could help.
WASHINGTON — The Organic Trade Association (OTA) has honored Albert Straus, founder of Straus Family Creamery and a second-generation organic dairy farmer, with its prestigious Organic Lifetime Achievement Award.
Elsewhere in the grocery store, shoppers are on the hunt for bargains. But sales of high-priced premium butter, including Straus Family Creamery’s are growing.
