The Propane FEED program encourages the adoption of new propane equipment on farming operations. It’s a demonstration program that gives farmers a financial incentive when they purchase eligible equipment and agree to share their experiences with the Propane Education and Research Council and others.
According to PERC Projects Manager Brandon Robinson - farmers will have another chance to participate in 2011. He says the program was a big hit in 2010…
“We had a total of 36 farmers spread out among 14 states, coast to coast, in the program and we’re starting to collect data from them. We now are looking to 2011 to make the program even bigger, get out to more states, and our goal is to have 60 farmers from across the country enrolled in the program.”
Robinson says PERC is hearing from current FEED program participants and learning a lot about how these new pieces of propane equipment are being used in the field and how they’re performing…
“We’re getting great feedback. Everyone is telling us that they’re getting a lot of savings, some are recouping in a matter of months the incremental costs.”
Robinson says farmers are not the only ones who are getting something out of the Propane FEED program. Future propane equipment users benefit as well. Robinson says this is a great way to provide feedback that can result in the improvement of existing products and the creation of new products that help farmers do their job more effectively…
“Our charge at PERC is to work with farmers to find new ways to solve problems on the farm. And one of the benefits of this program is it gives us real voice of customer data, from real farmers who are using the equipment on real farms in real settings and then we can take the information we get back from them and leverage our relationship with the manufacturers of those products and say ‘farmers would like to see this changed’, or ‘it would be really beneficial to them if they had this feature’ , and in the end we can help them have a more efficient, more effective operation like propane irrigation engines and propane mowers.”
Propane FEED program incentives are available for four-cylinder, six-cylinder, eight-cylinder and 10-cylinder irrigation engines as well as propane mowers. They range from 15-hundred to 25-hundred dollars.
For more information - including a detailed list of equipment and farmer eligibility requirements - visit www dot agpropane dot com slash FEED.
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