It’s a raw, rainy afternoon at Reinford Farms in Mifflintown, Pa., and Kathy Burns is as busy as ever.
Another load of green crates filled to the brim with gallons of milk has arrived. Driving a skid loader, she lifts one of the crates and dumps all the gallons into a large pile. Another employee pushes the gallons into a de-packager, a machine that mechanically separates each plastic gallon from the milk.
Where does the milk go? Into one of the farm’s two manure digesters that generate power for hundreds of homes.
The milk is like white gold for farmer Brett Reinford.
“It’s a good fertilizer once it goes through the digesting process. Last year, we didn’t buy any commercial fertilizer. We just used the food waste and manure,” he says with a laugh.
The benefits go well beyond Reinford’s ability to cut fertilizer costs or power homes.
Last year, the farm took in more than 1,700 tons of waste milk from a Dollar General fresh foods distribution center near Pottsville, Pa. That’s milk that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill, says John Gleisner, director of Dollar General's Pottsville, Pa., distribution center.
"The fact that we were able to take and repurpose what would otherwise have been a waste product, and possibly just gone into a specialized landfill because it is milk, here we're able to do something that's going to make electricity," Gleisner says.
The farm’s partnership with Dollar General is the only one of its kind in the U.S. From its Pottsville facility, which services 1,800 stores in the Northeast, the company threw out a staggering 13,000 tons of dairy products in 2024, mostly fluid milk that had been compromised, expired or gone bad for any number of reasons.
More than 11,000 tons went to feed mills to be made into animal feed; the rest went back to Reinford Farms, which gets loads of green crates three times a week.
See more about the partnership here:
Poop to power
The first manure digester at Reinford Farms was built in 2009, and it was one of the first of its kind in the region to go on line. The initial 500,000-gallon digester was built with a 140-kilowatt motor.
A second, much bigger digester — 1.5-million-gallon capacity with 500-kilowatt motor — was built in 2019. The system can power 500 homes, but limitations with electric generation mean most of the gas produced — 60% — is flared off.
Reinford says the farm is planning to install a 1.3-megawatt motor in June, which would max out the digester’s capacity to produce power and could generate electricity for more than 1,000 homes.
Waste heat from the system provides power and water to the farm.
The first system took in manure from 400 cows, but the herd size has since increased to more than 700 head.
Pivot to food waste
Reinford says the initial focus of the project was to deal with neighbor complaints over manure being spread on fields.
Then, a local Walmart representative called and asked if the farm could take food waste from select Pennsylvania and New York stores. With advice from Penn State Extension, Reinford says the farm accepted source-separated fruits and vegetables from Walmart. His father, Steve Reinford, installed a concrete pad and bought a pull-type chopper to process the materials.
They began accepting packaged food waste after buying a de-packager in Minnesota. They designed and built a warehouse to accept food waste, and through a third party, Rubicon, started taking packaged food waste in 2017.
"The first year we lost a lot of money de-packing because we didn't know what the price points were,” Reinford says. “We built that with the assumption that we were going to recycle everything, all the packaging, all the tin, all the cardboard, and at the time China was paying $250 a ton for cardboard. That market fell apart within a year. The first two years, we were underwater for sure until we got ahead of it."
Their partnership with Dollar General started in 2019, but Reinford says they have more than 50 clients they take food waste from. Most of these are one-off jobs from companies like Coca-Cola. Last year, the farm processed 60,000 tons of packaged food waste from 3,000 truckloads.
It generates tipping fees, energy, fertilizer and cow bedding.
They farm 1,400 acres, 600 of which they own. Most manure is drag-lined onto fields with 900 acres having buried lines. The rest is hauled.
About 11% of the food waste, mostly plastic, goes back to a landfill after being separated.
"We put a lot of labor on the front end to get the recycling stuff,” Reinford says. “Most de-packagers … are like 30% to the landfill. Whatever comes in, they run it through the machine, and they don't save anything. We do have a mission to recycle what we can, to reuse what we can.”
Another manure digester might be built if the amount of food waste increases, but Reinford says the plan is to produce compressed natural gas as the farm is limited to how much power can be put on the grid.
"It just doesn’t slow up,” he says. “There's a lot out there and we've been able to build relationships with a lot of companies.”
