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| August 4, 2006
Greener pastures BY RICH MELLOTT
Along with regularly judging ice cream contests, he once won an award as the créme de la créme of the judging set. He couldn’t wait to put his passion and palate to work at his family dairy in Marshall. “I knew I wanted to produce ice cream some day,” he said. It took him 25 years, but the Straus Family Creamery introduced a line of ice cream three years ago. Forgive Straus his procrastination, which isn’t the way he usually operates. But all these other more pressing priorities kept popping up—such as developing a model for sustainable, energy-efficient and environmentally sound dairy farming that was years ahead of the curve. What’s more, Straus’s activism, determination and perseverance over the past 20 years helped break down innumerable barriers. Straus and other green entrepreneurs across the country have cut a new trail that others are already following. More are sure to follow. The green movement is suddenly fashionable, partly because visionaries like Straus have demonstrated that they can turn a profit and preserve the environment at the same time. Green is everywhere this summer, in the theaters (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth), Wall Street (the organic market produced $14 billion in U.S. sales last year) and even at your neighborhood corporate outlets like Wal-Mart and McDonalds—who know a catchy marketing ploy when they see one. Straus has been pushing everything green for years, so you’d think his reaction to all this greenery would be, “It’s about time.” (Or, “See, I told you so.”) Not so. “I’m just thankful that people are realizing that it’s the way go,” says Straus, “and especially for family farms, which need to do it to survive.” Ten years ago, dairy ranchers were in dire straits. Zoning regulations, escalating energy prices and soaring real-estate values were taking their toll. They were selling out or otherwise dropping like so many flies caught in one of Straus’s solar-powered fly-zappers. Straus advised his colleagues that the way to survive was to go organic and become self-sustaining and find new and creative ways to conserve energy. Back then, the green movement was “such a small part of the market. But now it’s become enough of an influence that people are aware of it,” says Straus. The Straus family has been living the concept for generations. Albert’s father founded the family dairy in 1941. A Jewish immigrant from Germany, Bill Straus didn’t bring dairy knowledge with him, but he did have some strong views about what quality was and the importance of preserving where you live and what you have. Not your typical dairy farmers, Albert’s parents took the kids to the county board of supervisors meetings and read them Rachel Carson’s environmental classic Silent Spring at bedtime. “We always tried to be as self-sustaining as we could,” Albert Straus says. In 1993, Straus converted the dairy into the first certified organic dairy west of the Mississippi. In 1996, he expanded the operation to include a creamery to bottle and market the milk and a new line of dairy products. Straus drives an electric car and he’s in the process of converting other dairy vehicles to run on vegetable oil. He’s experimented with wind and solar energy. Then last spring he started cashing in on cow poop. Some people thought he was nuts. “Most people just wait to see if something like that is economically feasible,” he says. “They’ll wait and watch. People who criticized me for going organic have either converted to organic or are out of the dairy business.” Straus’s most recent project is converting cow manure to methane gas, which helps power the home and dairy. The conversion begins when the barns are hosed down after each milking, with the water and waste pouring into a pond, where the liquid is separated and channeled into another pond. Bacteria then break down the manure in a process called anaerobic digestion. One of the by-products of the process is methane gas, which is piped into a combustion engine, which fuels a generator, which converts the gas into electricity. Along with providing power, the process keeps all that gas the cows produce out of the ozone. Methane gas is estimated to be 20 times more damaging to the ozone than carbon dioxide. Straus saw Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth recently, and said it was definitely an eye-opener—even to a man who knows a lot about greenhouse gases and the precious ozone; a guy who has spent the better part of the last decade trying to inform others about the fragile nature of the environment. And the perils of cow poop. “It made me feel more of a need that things have to change quicker than I even thought,” he said. “It made me feel there is a lot more work to do.” PHOTO BY ROBERT VENTE: At top, Albert Straus, left, and Flossy, right, can both attest to the power of cattle-produced methane. |
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When Albert Straus was studying dairy science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in the mid-1970s, he discovered that not only did he possess a passion for eating large quantities of ice cream, he also had a natural talent for tasting it.  |
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