There’s a new “green” plant sprouting among the crops in central Pennsylvania. Construction on Perdue AgriBusiness’ soybean processing plant in Conoy Township is well under way. 

Unlike corn, soybeans have to processed. The beans are crushed to create soybean meal – a key ingredient in animal feed, and soybean oil (the same oil used in many food products and for cooking). Right now, only about a third of the soybeans grown in Pennsylvania are “crushed” in Pennsylvania. Soybean farmers have transport the rest out of state, before the processed meal and hulls are brought back for sale to Pennsylvania’s dairy and livestock farmers.

Transporting beans cuts into farmers’ profits, and bringing the meal back adds costs for livestock and dairy farmers. That transport also carries a heavy environmental cost. 

The new Perdue AgriBusiness soybean plant will eliminate the need to move both soybeans and finished products the distances they travel today, reducing costs for farmers while eliminating carbon emissions from transporting around 20 million bushels of soybeans out of state and bringing the feed ingredients back. That can reduce carbon emissions by more than 26 million tons per year.

But, as the TV commercials say: “wait, that’s not all!” To run the new plant, Perdue will purchase steam from the adjacent Lancaster Solid Waste Management Authority’s waste-to-energy program. Using the waste thermal energy eliminates the need to heat our soybean plant’s boilers with fossil fuels.

Our new soybean plant will result in net carbon emissions decrease of approximately 41,000 tons compared to current practices of transporting the beans to conventionally fueled soybean processing plant. That’s the equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from the energy used by more than 4,300 homes in one year, or by driving an average passenger car 98.5 million miles.

Thanks to Perdue Agribusiness’s new processing plant, Pennsylvania’s soybean fields are looking a lot more “green.”