The innovative project, led by two Asturian entrepreneurs and expected to take off dramatically
this year, could become a real revolution thanks to its professional benefits for the
livestock sector and its environmental and social impact on rural areas
Although technology has had a colossal impact on agriculture and livestock farming, the way the sector embraces its innovations never ceases to surprise, precisely because of its traditional nature. The latest proposal to leave us open-mouthed comes from two Asturian entrepreneurs. It is a dairytech (technology applied to the dairy sector) and it reinvents the concept of the petrol station (‘gasolinera’ in Spanish), adapting it to the livestock world. We say reinvents because, despite being called Agrolinera and having a hose, it is not an ordinary fuel pump but a receiving tank, in this case for whey and slurry from cheese dairies and mainly cattle farms. Shaped like a shipping container, it makes it easier to collect this waste in rural areas so that it can be valorised in biogas production, and nine of the cheese dairies of the Cabrales PDO are already using it. The first Agrolinera has been installed in Tielve as a pilot project and, from this village in the heart of the Picos de Europa National Park, it hopes to gain momentum and conquer the market, making the definitive leap to commercial launch very soon.
“In the next two months.” So confirms Verónica Menéndez Rodríguez, CEO of Agrolinera Astur SL and co-founder, together with Juan Gutiérrez Canseco, now its chief technology officer, of this start-up which, about to turn three, is preparing for a meteoric take-off in 2025 if all goes to plan, closing the year with a turnover of around “500,000 euros”, up from the 50,000 with which it ended 2024.
For now, it has three boosters to get there: first, it is a completely innovative project on a global scale; second, it responds to “a need, a waste that is there, that nobody quite knows what to do with, but that has to be managed”, offering a solution to thousands of potential users whom it can save money and time in their work; and finally, it helps integrate livestock farming and cheesemaking into the environment and the territory where they are based, securing jobs and keeping people rooted in rural areas.
From Shanghai to Salas
Securing these three key assets has not, however, been an easy task for Verónica and Juan, two economists with strong local ties to the Asturian municipality of Salas, whose entrepreneurial DNA brought them together in 2005, curiously far from their beloved homeland, in Shanghai. There they had already launched a start-up focused on the traceability of industrial products shipped to Europe, which kept them moving between Asturias and China for seven years until, in 2012, they decided to run it from home; with the pandemic, however, it no longer fitted their life plans and they brought it to a close. That is where “all the past experience” came in, along with their decision to set their sights on a field that fully interested them: renewable energy.
Having a close friend in livestock farming, coming from a predominantly livestock-farming municipality and seeing, more closely than ever, the waste management problems facing the sector led Verónica and Juan to want to develop technologies that would secure the future of traditional livestock farming, which they consider vital for rural society and the environment. In Asturias and other parts of Spain, however, it is constrained by being made up of small farms scattered across rugged terrain, which makes collecting the waste more expensive than the value later obtained from it. “We kept thinking and came up with the idea of a mobile container to collect the slurry that is a real problem for livestock farmers; then, that it should also generate data; and finally, that this data should be used to add value to the waste in the best possible conditions,” the CEO explains. And so, in 2022, Agrolinera Astur SL was born, becoming “the
first” among the many companies seeking ways to minimise the impact of slurry on different fronts to “try to eliminate the problem at its root by changing the process”, digitalising it from collection onwards.
The proposal, the entrepreneur explains, delighted the Government of the Principality of Asturias, whose officials also opened their eyes to the possibility of using the container to collect whey as well. These were the first steps of an initiative that has since involved “a lot of fieldwork” for Verónica and Juan, knocking on doors, first with their own resources and, as it developed, with financial support from the Principality of Asturias’s Sekuens agency, the Fundación Caja Rural de Asturias and EDP España. With that essential financial backing, the entrepreneurial duo has been able to build cooperative ties with all the parties involved, above all waste operators as customers and livestock farmers and cheesemakers as users.
They have also been able to include their initiative in various regional, national and European programmes, until they finally
reached the point of feeling that “it’s perfect”. “We are doing what we wanted: a sustainable project that gives back to the territory, and at home,” Verónica stresses.
Replication and expansion
The CEO therefore faces this moment, as the first of their dairytech units finally takes shape, with high expectations. A third person, Israel Mestas, has been hired to run the Tielve Agrolinera. He has guided the ten or so cheese dairies that are starting to deliver whey to the container (which holds 14,000 litres), accessing the service through a touchscreen with their own user account. The system, which is connected to the cloud and uses remote monitoring to coordinate collection by lorry and transport of the waste to the biogas plant (ultimately the Agrolinera’s customer), will soon stop being a prototype and will be extended to the whole Cabrales PDO, then replicated among the cheese dairies of the Gamoneu PDO and expanded further afield, with new valorisation routes in sight for this waste, which has multiple applications in food and cosmetics.
Over the course of this year, that expansion will also coincide with the commercial launch of devices and equipment for slurry management, patented by Verónica Menéndez and Juan Gutiérrez in Spain, Europe and the USA. They will be installed in slurry pits, analyse various parameters to determine the optimum time for collection and keep lorries from entering the farms, with the resulting savings: financial for the farmer and in terms of health for the herd itself.
“Royal” visibility
The various programmes Agrolinera has made its way into have given the project great visibility, which has grown with awards such as the Asturian Government’s Radar 2024 award for entrepreneurial innovation, the Rural Startup Awards in the Sustainability category, and the Fundación Roberto Rivas (Pontevedra) award for Innovative Rural Entrepreneurship 2024. But without doubt, if anything has given this venture “Royal” exposure, it was the meeting that King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía held with Verónica and Juan during their trip to Asturias to present Sotres with the title of Exemplary Village of Asturias 2024. It was on 26 October that they saw the Agrolinera first-hand through a 1:12 scale model. Still moved by the privilege of such a distinguished visit, Verónica recalls that they were very interested and, in Princess Leonor’s case, especially “curious” about the system.
The Agrolinera will generate data that
helps add value to the waste
in the best possible conditions