New uses for soy products are being discovered regularly, and one of those uses is for firefighters. The product was developed with help from the United Soybean Board. Dave Garlie is Chief Technology Officer at Cross Plains Solutions.

“So we came across this opportunity because we’ve done a lot of projects with United Soybean Board and, thank you, farmers, because your checkoff dollars support these funds in research initiatives. So we were asked by the USB because I’ve been in this business as a research scientist for about 30 years with agriculture products, corn and beans being predominant. So, we came across this, and they say, Hey, can you make a fire foam from soy? Well, yes, I can because, in my prior life, I have made a lot of adhesive systems, and foam is typically bad for those formulations.”

He says the soy firefighting foam is better for the environment as it doesn’t contain the traditional PFOS chemicals. They’ve been replaced with soy meal.

“We’re taking what’s readily available. So we take a look at the protein foams that we have today or the protein source that’s readily available today in North America, and soybeans are king. We have a glut of meal on the market because the technology to grow beans per acre is so effective. We’re just out-consuming the demand for feed out and human consumption. So the United Soybean Board has put opportunities together to emphasize finding new markets for it.”

And what makes soy meal right for firefighting foam?

“We take the soy meal, we repurpose it, and how we repurpose it is we take advantage of what’s in the soy meal. So what makes protein foam so efficient is the peptide sequence that’s readily available, by nature, in the meal. So we have the ways and means to repurpose the soy meal into a functional, workable system that has the rheology, the viscosity, and the liquidness, that the firemen can put through their existing equipment to eradicate a multitude of different types of fires.”