PRINCETON, Ky. — The Kentucky Soybean Promotion Board (KSPB) met Aug. 11 at General Butler State Park in Carrollton following the Association meeting, and in addition to regular business, the farmer-leaders invested some of Kentucky’s soybean checkoff dollars into projects with Clean Fuels Alliance America (formerly known as the National Biodiesel Board), international marketing projects designed to grow demand for US Soy, and the Board’s Soy Innovation Challenge.
The group was excited to tour the Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research during its summer meeting and see firsthand the process by which soybean hulls, normally viewed as a low-value byproduct, could turn into an additional profit center for soybean farmers. The project that won our inaugural Soy Innovation Challenge centered around extracting activated carbon from soybean hulls for use in 3-D printed filament for supercapacitors (batteries).
Even better, one of the guides on the board’s tour was Athira Nair Surendran, the student who presented the winning concept for the Soy Innovation Challenge at the Board’s December meeting. Regular readers of the Kentucky Soybean Sentinel magazine may recall that this proposal focused on finding an additional revenue source for soybean farmers, and that return-on-investment potential was one reason that several directors ranked this concept as their number one choice. To read more about this exciting program, visit kysoy.org and click Kentucky Soybean Sentinel on the home page. The story may be found on page 33 of the Spring 2022 issue.
This year’s Soy Innovation Challenge is already mapped out, courtesy of Dr. Jagannadh Satyavolu, Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy Research at the Conn Center. Dr. Satyavolu has expanded this second year of the challenge to include students at Bellarmine University, Sullivan University, and Jefferson Community and Technical College in addition to those who attend the University of Louisville.
Student teams from these institutions will present concepts for new uses or integrations of soy components to the Board in September, and selected concepts will be awarded seed money to develop those concepts into proposals, which will be presented in December.
— Kentucky Soybean Board and Association