The Pacific Coast Coalition’s Dairy Business Innovation Initiative encourages dairy producers and processors to apply for $4.1 million in available grants.
The grants are offered to dairymen in six states: California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.
Applications are due by Feb. 29, 2024, and can be completed here. This fourth round of funding will include pandemic recovery (such as price declines and additional marketing costs due to COVID-19.)
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Here are the areas that meet program goals
- Developing new dairy value-added products, culturally diverse and ethnic value-added dairy products to meet evolving consumer trends in the region.
- Adapting current dairy products to meet evolving consumer “wants,” to meet both domestic and export demand trends.
- Developing new product lines and expanding the dairy product portfolio to meet domestic and/or export demand for fresh milk and milk products.
- Expanding milk usage beyond food and drink, for example, packaging or films, edible products for companion animals, cosmetics, and other high-value segments.
- Adding value to milk by increasing its intrinsic value through differentiation production system and feed additives for nutritional enhancement and fractionation of components.
- Adopting alternative processing technologies for value-added dairy products, optimization, or recovery of high-value co-streams to increase the profitability of the dairy sector.
- Creating future opportunities for value-added ingredients and nutritional powders, milk fat products, and specialty blends, and decreasing the dependence on commodity markets.
- Developing sustainability leadership through innovation in packaging, processing efficiencies, reduced losses and waste, and novel uses of co-products (net-zero dairy processing plants).
- Extending awareness and consumption of higher-value dairy processing products through communications, strategic planning, marketing plans, and expanding hands-on agritourism
This is the fourth round of grant funding through the PCC-DBII. Once this round closes, the PCC-DBII will have made nearly $9.1 million in grants from the USDA AMS available to regional dairy businesses for innovation-related investments, helping dairy processors evolve their operations and adopt more sustainable practices.
»Related: Innovation and science fuel U.S. dairy sustainability
