July 15, 2009

Georgia Department of Agriculture
19 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. SW
Atlanta, GA 30334

The State of Georgia is one of the largest fruit producers in the U.S. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste in this industry and 50% of the fruit never makes it to the market. Because of recent congressional mandates that call for the production of 36 billion gallons of fuel ethanol annually by the year 2022, there is a significant opportunity to convert the waste fruit into fuel ethanol and a dried distillers grains co-product that would be used as animal feed for the livestock and poultry industries.

Several of our state fruit and vegetable associations are interested in this possibility. The Georgia Mountain Apple Growers Association, the Georgia Peach Council, and the Georgia Watermelon Association have been working with Drs. Elliot Altman and Mark Eiteman at the
University of Georgia to develop protocols to convert waste apples, peaches, and watermelon into fuel ethanol and a dried distillers grains.

Because of the close co-location of the different farming groups, one intriguing possibility is that some sort of farming consortium could be set up to collect the waste from several farms and then deliver them to a centrally located ethanol plant. The Georgia Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association strongly endorses the proposal from Drs. Altman and Eiteman titled “Converting fruit waste into fuel ethanol and a dried distillers grains co-product.”

Sincerely,
Beth Bland
Program Coordinator
Georgia Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association
P.O. Box 2945
LaGrange, GA 30241