Well, financially, we haven't seen any savings. As a matter of fact, using biodiesel is actually costing us more than regular diesel would. That being said, the reduction in our environmental footprint that the use of bio-diesel has created has provided us with a lot of other benefits that we never foresaw. We have companies calling us up constantly wanting to interview us. We're doing ads in the paper, our customers want to tell our story, our local papers want to tell our story, our consumers are interested in what O.G.C., is doing. They come to talk to us about what they can do to use less and make better business decisions for the long-term.
We see it as the right thing to do, both from values practices but also from a business perspective, because any organization that thinks that they're going to be able to run on petroleum diesel for the rest of their life is mistaken.

What we've realized is that it's relatively competitive. During the peak of the diesel prices back in last August, 2006 we actually paid less for bio-diesel for a short period of time than everybody else was paying for petro diesel. So anytime diesel reaches over about $3.25, $3.50 a gallon, bio-diesel is cheaper, and at that point it makes an extremely smart business case to go in that direction, not just for price but because of the environmental benefits, as well.

We haven't really noticed a decrease in performance with biodiesel versus petroleum. The lubricity that biodiesel offers versus petroleum is, any biodiesel aficionado will tell you, will more than make up for the lack of energy content in the increased lubrication of the engine and overall efficiency that it impacts.

Yes, there are. What has happened over the last five years is that the government has wanted to provide incentives to encourage the use of renewable fuels and to make them competitive with petroleum diesel. In order to do that they've come up with a tax incentive structure to where for every percent of bio-diesel that you blend with petro diesel you receive one penny per gallon tax credit. So, what was normally a $3.50 gallon B100 price for bio-diesel, after it's blended would then theoretically be $2.51 a gallon B-99 bio-diesel.
The way that the government outlines it is if you run B-100 you're not eligible for the one penny per percent blending credit that you receive for B-99, so by running B-99 instead of B-100 the blender receives a .99 cent per gallon tax credit. So, it makes bio-diesel very competitive with petro diesel.

Within the next year to two years our goal is to transition to 99% bio-diesel and 1% petroleum diesel. We've just started a new program where we're piloting a B-99 trial in three of our trucks. One of the issues with bio-diesel is that it has a low cloud point. Here in Oregon the mean temperature is 55 and in the wintertime it's often below freezing, so we've experienced a few occasions where our trucks wouldn't start in the morning, or you'd run into problems where they'd reduce their performance on the road because of how cold it is.
So, what we did is we went to a company out of Minnesota Arctic Fox that installed a lot of heated fuel systems on trucks there, so what this heated fuel systems does is it keeps the temperature of the tank above about 35 degrees in that range, so it reduces the likelihood of gelling. It's been about a month now and we've experienced below 30 degree weather and we have not had any issues to date.

When we came back to approach it again, we were extremely cautious. We went down to a B-20 blend and convinced our blender to start using a smaller micron fuel filter to get most of the product out of there. We tried it in only one of our trucks, just to get our toe in the water to minimize our risk if there were any problems with it.
So we persisted with that for about six to eight months with doing B-20 in one truck. Then we upped that to another truck and we did that for about a year. We were extremely cautious because we had too many problems with it in the past. That was early in 2005. From that point we ran our whole fleet on B20 successfully for about nine months which brings us up to mid-2006.

The first time we tried it in 2001 it didn't work. Tried it again in 2002 and 2003 both with problems. One of the problems that we had was the micron level in our fuel filters. We were running in the tractors a 3 micron fuel filter, while the tanks that were filtering it to go into our trucks was a 25 micron filter. So what was happening is we were getting a lot of organic and water inside of our fuel filters that were wicking and creating a situation where our fuels couldn't get into our engine. So, it wasn't until 2004 when we had our first real successful experience with bio-diesel.

Back in 2001 I started to do some research on biodiesel and found a local company called Pacific Northwest Bio-diesel. And what we ended up doing is we ended up setting up a deal where we're going to run B100 or 100% pure bio-diesel in all of our trucks and it was going to be a $1.65 a gallon, so about 10%-15% higher than we were paying for regular diesel fuel at that point.
At the end of six months we had an issue when one day when about 5 of our trucks were on the road and all the fuel in their tanks jelled. Our trucks would not run. So, I get calls people freaking out, customers are pissed, I'm wondering how did I manage to convince everybody to do this and then have it turn around on me like that, and I definitely had my tail between my legs there for a while.
We realized we were not doing the world any good if our trucks are sitting at the side of the road full of produce, organic or not, and we had to put a halt on it for the time being until some more problems had been solved with biodiesel.

We are an organic produce distributor and from our beginnings in the early '80s all the way through the mid- to late '90s we experienced solid growth. From that point we really we achieved our mission; organics was widely accepted, it became government-certified, and at that point our mission to promote health through organic agriculture had really been achieved. Organics have been widely accepted, so we stepped back and really asked ourselves, what is it that we're here to achieve now? And there was a fair amount of feeling that a mission statement ought to have some edge to it.
Years ago, people said organic agriculture couldn't be done on a large scale, and our farmers have been successful at growing marketplace for that. And I think the same thing is happening with fossil fuel use. I think we set a really tough goal for ourselves, which is, we want to be carbon neutral, so emitting no more carbon than we're sequestering.
To do that, we want to get off fossil fuel use long term. And in some ways that's a scary goal because the technology isn't necessarily there to be doing it right now and the prices are not necessarily competitive but we figure we're stating that that's where we want to go and we're starting to create a market for that.