The Rural Voice, 1995-10, Page 12LE
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8 THE RURAL VOICE
Scrap Book
Turning manure into a profit centre
Farmers are starting to
rediscover the value of manure -
but few have turned it into a cash
generator the way Bob Noten-
bomer of Etzikom, Alberta has.
When Notenbomer decided to
convert his chicken barn into a
hog barn, he had a serious
problem of what to do with the
manure on his 20 -acre farm. He
could have followed the normal
trend and installed slatted floors, a
lagoon and pump and bought a
manure wagon but "We went
away from it because of the strong
smell."
Instead, for $120,000, about the
same as he'd have spent to
convert to liquid manure, he
installed a manure composting
system. The hogs are bedded in
23 centimetres of sawdust. Each
morning the manure is scraped
out with a skid -steer loader and
taken to a composting pile. The
manure is turned daily by a
machine mounted on a raised
cement wall 2.4 metres high and
2.7 metres wide and 73 metres
long. Each day the manure is
moved about 1.8 metres along the
long cement pit. By the time it
gets to the other end, four weeks
later, it is an odorless soil.
The 75 per cent manure and 25
per cent sawdust mix reaches 150
degrees Celsius during the com-
posting process. Even Noten-
bomer's dead hogs get tossed in
the pile.
"It gets very, very hot," he says.
When he converted the chicken
barn into a 300 -sow operation he
wanted pens to be "pig -friendly"
with a way of recycling the waste,
Notenbomer said.
He gets about eight cubic
metres (10.5 cubic yards) of soil
each day and sells it for about $30
a cubic yard. Because the sterile
soil is about three per cent
nitrogen, it is in demand as a
potting soil mix.0
-Source: Western Producer
New use for veggie oil: cleaning water?
Vegetable oils may be the
answer to cleaning
groundwater contaminated by
nitrogen fertilizers, including
cattle manure, new research
shows.
U.S. department of
agriculture researchers in
Colorado say water can be
cleansed by injecting the oil
under pressure into the base
of existing wells. The oil is
insoluble with water and
forms a plume of tiny
droplets that become trapped
among the soil particles to
form an organic filter.
"When groundwater is pumped
from the wells it would have to pass
through this oil filter", said William
Hunter, a microbiologist with the
USDA. "The oil provides a carbon
source for enhancing the population
of natural microorganisms that 'eat'
the nitrogen, converting it into
harmless nitrogen gas."
Apart from cattle manure,
applying too much fertilizer
and excessive irrigation are
common causes of
groundwater contamination.
"Both corn and soybean
oil rapidly stimulate
bacterial denitrification,"
said Hunter. "This even
works at nitrate
concentrations that are 200
times higher than the
maximum permissible level
for drinking water."
The Colorado research
involved laboratory col-
umns of packed soil.
Columns that received only a single
oil treatment continued to work for
more than a year. The researchers
used their research to estimate that
1.42 litres of soybean oil could
remove 10 parts per million of
nitrate -nitrogen from 37,854 litres of
contaminated water.
The researchers said other
vegetable oils could also be used.0
— Source: Western Producer