Dairy Dialog podcast: protective cultures, LNG and ZISK
Moving to LNG
Dairy Partners, in Wales, is set to become the first cheese manufacturer in the UK to be fueled by LNG.
It’s estimated the company can cut its energy costs by 29% a year by switching from light fuel oil to LNG, and Oliver Knight, LNG specialist at Calor, the company helping the dairy to make the switch, spoke of the benefits.
LNG can also help sites reduce their carbon emissions, with Dairy Partners’ facility set to cut its CO2 output by 30%, Calor said.
App for farmers
ZISK is a new and free app for dairy farmers from Iowa.
The app projects the next 12 months profit/loss for dairy farmers, providing updates every 10 minutes, and creating customized alerts for farmers.
Users can download the app, for either iPhone or Android, enter the total number of cows in the herd, enter the typical milk check basis over Class III price, and the app utilizes multiple algorithms that incorporate the expenses of running a dairy along with a continuously updating live feed from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to calculate feed costs.
We speak to one of its creators, Kevin Hoogendoorn.
Protective cultures
DuPont Nutrition & Health’s HOLDBAC YM (yeast and mold) Protective Cultures were launched 20 years ago, and yet the products for the dairy industry continue to find new applications as trends change.
The cultures naturally maintains the taste and quality of yogurts, cheese and other fresh fermented foods throughout products’ shelf life, without the need for synthetic preservatives.
What began as a single product in 1998 has since expanded into five generations of cultures that are used in applications from yogurts to much more diverse dairy foods, like cheeses and butter spreads.
Malene Svejstrup, senior application scientist at DuPont, spoke to DairyReporter about the newest version of HOLDBAC YM-XP Protective cultures and working with customers to develop specific spoilage-protection issues.
Weekly update
And, as always, we end the podcast with a weekly update on the dairy markets with Liam Fenton from INTL FCStone.
