The principle of Agra-Gold Consulting says swine producers can dramatically reduce the costs associated with processing swine manure to remove phosphorus by utilizing two-cell earthen manure storages.
A two-cell storage system consists of 2 separate holding cells within a manure storage, the primary cell designed at about a third of the overall capacity, so the solids which contain the bulk of the phosphorus, will settle into that primary cell.
Agra-Gold Consulting, in partnership with the Manitoba Livestock Manure Management Initiative, will launch a project this summer to investigate management practices that will optimize the removal and use of nutrients from two-cell earthen manure storage lagoons on grow-finish operations.
Agra-Gold principle Scott Dick says the project will look at different ways of emptying the liquids and solids, using different agitation practices and different ways of managing those nutrients as they are coming out.
What we think we will find here is we can probably get 80 or 85 percent of the phosphorus into about 20 percent of the overall volume.
What that allows us to do is that it is certainly less expensive to apply close to the storage and usually it’s the fields that are closer to the storage that have higher phosphorus values.
So, from an environmental standpoint, we want to move the phosphorus away from those operations and, when we move it further and further, it costs more so if we can use a treatment system, such as a two-cell system, to concentrate that phosphorus, we can then move that phosphorus a longer distance away to fields that are phosphorus deficient at a lower overall cost to the operation.
It’s basically using a gravity settling system as a treatment system to perform this function.
Dick says different techniques will be applied to allow as much of the phosphorus to be concentrated in as small an amount of liquid as possible and extensive testing will be done throughout the process.
