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SUSTAINABILITY Articles
2010 is gonna be exciting!
As the holidays slide past and our shipping is out the door for 2009, we’re taking some of the extra time to turn our focus back to the planning of the new cheesehouse facility on the farm.
For several months we have been working with Payette, architect group extraordinaire, and continue to be delighted by their interest in our very unusual project. Payette, led by our Westport neighbor Jim Collins, is a Boston firm that loves creating prototypical structures. I’d say they’ve sure got that with our project! We are combining the retrofit of the existing barn, a new barn, and the new cheesehouse in our plan for a “net zero energy” project–relying on sun, wind, groundwater, and manure to provide all of our energy.
As far as we’ve been able to determine, Shy Brothers may be the first facility of this type in the U.S. Several farms have led the way by using wind turbines or manure management as a retrofit of their existing facilities (Karl and his brothers have two 10kw turbines), and there’s a Platinum LEED cheese house in Canada. It looks like we’re the first ones, however, to pull all the needs of the farm and cheese buildings together with design and integrate all of the four on-site energy resources to supply the facility’s needs–net zero energy.
Several of our friends have asked, of course, why we are doing this…Don’t we have our hands full enough with building the cheese business? The answer is yes, but it’s all of a piece. How can we hope to exemplify the future of a small dairy farm with our head in the sand by ignoring true sustainability? Also, strictly from a business standpoint, the energy requirements of our cheese making are huge, and that energy is not free. We believe that in the long run, what we’re doing will be a smart business move.
And, important to us is the idea that we can prove this can be done. Of course it can! We hope to show how we solved the challenges as a team. Peter Vieira with Payette has just been terrific. He’s just sent us the first “on-paper” block diagram of rooms and their environments. Karl, Leo, and I will pour over it Saturday and meet with Peter on line Monday using a program that will let us pass the pointer as well conference call.
More on our other team members and progress later.
Meanwhile, we hope your New Year is safe, fun, and yummy!
Barbara