Can small livestock farms be sustainable and profitable at the same time? Verónica Menéndez and Juan Gutiérrez Canseco, co-founders of the dairy-tech startup Agrolinera, asked themselves this question when they returned to Spain after a long spell abroad. They had worked in China for 20 years, focusing on quality control and logistics in the solar energy sector.
Menéndez had experience in waste management and had grown up in a village with significant farming activity in the Spanish province of Asturias. Together with her fellow Asturian Gutiérrez Canseco, they began to reflect on the problems facing rural farmers in their region and how bioenergy could solve some of them. « Small, isolated farms struggle with manure collection because they are harder to reach. Collecting manure on time is essential: if it is not delivered fresh to a biogas plant, it degrades on the farm itself, generating very high methane emissions. After the cows themselves, manure is the second leading cause of methane emissions worldwide », say Agrolinera’s co-founders.
Spreading too much slurry (liquid manure) on fields is another challenge for rural farmers. It takes fuel, time and careful nutrient management to avoid saturating the soil and polluting watercourses. Similarly, artisan cheese-making is often constrained by the ability to manage whey, its main by-product. Unlike industrial cheesemakers, small farms can find it difficult to invest in the equipment needed to extract value from whey before it degrades. This causes unpleasant odours and means losing lactose and proteins that could otherwise be recovered.
These problems inspired the startup Agrolinera to create collection, monitoring and pre-treatment systems for whey and slurry, designed for small-scale livestock farming. Agrolinera can adapt its equipment to small or large farms — from a single cow to 500 cows — using two types of system. The first is a shared collection system, using fixed or self-contained container systems, while the second focuses on individual collection, with systems installed in a slurry pit. The equipment is adapted to the type of waste produced, the geographical location and the type of creative recycling possible within the community.
Although they currently focus on the dairy sector, Agrolinera’s co-founders believe their technology could help farmers in other sectors, such as fish farming or olive oil production. «The logic is the same: everything organic has potential value, but it tends to degrade quickly. Smart waste management allows us to capture that value under controlled conditions, while helping traditional farmers to farm sustainably», they explain.
Thanks to the experience they gained in China, Agrolinera’s co-founders knew that digitalisation was key to their success. Their systems are monitored remotely by a team that tracks the status of the equipment through a cloud platform, which oversees the information, coordinates operations and integrates with logistics planning, helping to validate waste transactions for collection by biogas plants. Once collected, livestock waste and whey can be turned into animal feed, electricity and natural fertilisers. As Agrolinera’s co-founders put it: «It is not only the waste that adds value — the data does too. A verifiable process helps build trust between municipalities, treatment plants and farmers by certifying the methane emissions avoided and creating incentives that prevent environmental damage».
A pilot project is under way in the Picos de Europa National Park, in the Spanish province of Asturias. There, Agrolinera collects whey from artisan cheese dairies that produce the local blue cheese with the Cabrales Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). To date, Agrolinera’s systems have made it possible to transport six tanker loads of whey to biogas plants, mainly for the production of biomethane, which is then used to supply energy to homes in the area.
Agrolinera has recently reached several milestones, including the approval of its first patent. The startup is also part of a working group with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which creates the ISO standards used by organisations worldwide to improve the quality and safety of goods and services. Agrolinera plays a key role in developing a new ISO standard that aims to guide the digitalisation of the agri-food sector and standardise data flows, an essential step towards better coordination across the whole ecosystem.
In the future, Agrolinera hopes to expand to other European mountain regions, such as the Alps. As its co-founders explain: «The type of terrain determines the type of farming that is practised. Building on our experience, we would love to expand into Central Europe and the Mediterranean. We are also interested in contributing to the development of biogas in Europe and are exploring the possibility of making other products from waste, such as bio-based plastics».
Agrolinera completed the Rural Spain ClimAccelerator programme in 2024. Since then, the startup has signed an agreement with Climate KIC as a strategic investor and has joined its portfolio of almost 60 climate startups.
Source: https://www.climate-kic.org/news/agrolinera/