Bioscrubber for Removing Ammonia from Swine House Exhaust Air

Posted in: Environment by admin on January 1, 1997 | No Comments

The results presented don’t show the performances of the system on a long operation period and important fluctuations happened during the short period of 15 days. It would be difficult to extrapolate the behavior of the scrubber on the base of such a short term experiment.

The EQIP incentive – Legislators set new environmental program in motion

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The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has a budget of $1.3 billion of $200 million/ year (authorized by the federal government) to help farmers and ranchers deal with serious threats to soil and water related to natural resource problems. 65% of the funding will be oriented to priority areas (watersheds or other sensitive areas) identified by the states and the budget is to be split evenly between crop and livestock productions. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) – EQIP’s monitoring agency – is confident this program is going to get result because of his local level aims.
In addition to priority areas, farmers and ranchers can create a conservation plan for their sites. On a 5 to 10 years contracts basis, if their plan is accepted they can receive up to $10 000/year for a maximum sum of $50 000/contract . Certain conservation practices such as grassed waterways, filter strips or manure management facilities can be cost shared to up to 75%.
The EQIP Funds should not go for large operations as demanded by the Congress, so the NRCS used the same rules as other federal and states programs and the admissible livestock operations should not exceed 1000 animal units. As the program should adjust to the local needs, states could argue for a different guideline. The National Pork Producers Council consider that this figure is restricting considering the new trends in swine production and is concerned about the distribution in priority watersheds. An NRCS employee will be working with the NPPC members to make sure the program is well understood and used on different environmental projects.
The program will adjust as people at local level get engaged and states cooperate, and as the resources priorities get defined.
//This project is very interesting however no mention on education is made. Often to integrate new techniques and practices and education becomes. Education can also trigger other initiatives that may not be funded by the EQIP and produce important changes were big money is not involved.

Humane, Sustainable Feeder Pig Production; Transferring a Technology Developed in Sweden to Midwestern Hog Farms

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A cooperative project is currently being done to integrate to some Iowa farms models of more human and sustainable pig production systems developed by Swedish farmers in response to increasing environmental, animal welfare, consumer protection pressure and also in response to specific regulations in Sweden. The models tested were chosen considering swine welfare swine and maternal behavior of sows observations obtained in experimental settings that were semi-natural. Management-intensive, deep-bedded, group housing system for gestating, farrowing and nursing sows and their litter are tested in 3 cooperating Minnesota and Iowa farms including on the Armstrong Research and Demonstration Farm (Lewis, Iowa) of the Iowa State University. Monitoring of the adoption and adjustment processes is realized and preliminary results show that Midwestern hog farmers could benefit from the Swedish model however attentive and consistant high-level management is required to obtain good production performances.

This production is likely to produce ammonia and nitrous oxide as other systems on litter. However no information is given and no measurements on those gases were done. These systems are more time consuming for the manure management.

Passive versus Active Aeration for Composting.

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Three different material, pine shaving, grass hay and wheat straw, have been used as substrate for swine manure composting. Substrate – manure mixes at 40, 32 and 28% dry matter were passively (ducts installed under the compost pile) and actively (2 ml of air/s per kg of original dry matter) aerated in duplicate during 21 days. The temperature measured in both aeration regimes gave similar values and reaches damaging temperatures (above 65 C) where the microbial activity stops. However more drying of the compost material was observed with the active aeration. The convective air flux seemed to be related to microbial activity and heat generation rather than the temperature differential between the compost and the ambient air. Further work is needed to better understand the phenomena that acting on the temperature.
Composting is a way to stabilize manure and to reduce odour emissions also. However in order to obtain a good quality compost, the temperature have to stay in a certain range between 55 to 65 C. No results show the compost composition after the 21 days but composting process is known to result in ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions which are detrimental to the environment.

Environmentally friendly diet reduces phosphorus loss

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Growing pig need phosphorus to grow, to have a good feed conversion, to produce a lean carcass and also to have strong bones (bones with a good mineral level). The phosphorus contained in the feedgrains is poorly used by the digestive track of the growing pigs because an important portion of it is bound in the form of phytate: 66% of the phosphorus in the corn and 61% in the soybean. So the feed industry supplement the pig’s diet using inorganic phosphorus sources (monocalcium phosphate, dicalcium phosphate and deflourinated phosphate. The supplemented diet gives the pig the phosphorus it needs and the unavailable or unusable phosphorus (phytate) gets release in the manure produced by the animal. The problem with the excess phosphorus in the manure is that when fertilization is done according to the plant’s nitrogen needs, the volume applied contains more phosphorus than the plant needs. The excess phosphorus is relatively immobile and is absorbed onto soil particles.
Microbial phytase, an enzyme produce by the Aspergillus niger, can be added to the diet of the pigs to make the phytate phosphorus contained in the grains available. Experiments have shown significant reduction in the phosphorus excretion with pigs fed low phosphorus diets containing phytase (of 20 to 40% at the University of Kentucky and in the Netherlands where phytase is used in 60% of the swine rations, the phosphorus contain has decreased from .73 g/lb. of manure in 1973 to .30g/lb of manure in 1995) .
A specialist for the Netherlands, Age Jongbloed, mention that so far the nutritional approach has been the one leading to the most significant reduction in pollution and is the most cost efficient.
The microbial form of phytase from BASF company (Bart Cousins, Fort Dodge, IA) costs $1.36/lb and 0.8lb/ton should be added to complete feed providing 136 phytase units/lb.
Phytase added to the feed should be well mixed and as it is an enzyme no heating process should be done after incorporated. A liquid form can be sprayed on the pellets.

As mentioned, the phosphorus in excess will be stored in the soil. At a high concentration, the phosphorus will leach to the surface water. Thus it is important to prevent phosphorus from being excessively stored in the soil. Phytase is a good and effective way of doing it because the feed is used more efficiently by the pigs and less phosphorus is excreted in the manure.

Dust Effects on Odor and Odor Compounds

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The influence of dust particules on odors coming from livestock building was evaluated in laboratory using full-scale installations. The ventilation air coming from four nursery rooms ventilated separately passed through chopped cornstalks and corncobs used as substrate in four biofilters. Samples of the ventilation air before and after the biofilters treatments were taken for dust analysis (total dust concentration, the particule distribution) and odor threshold determination by olfactometry. The results obtained showed that the odor threshold could be reducted to up to 76% with particules removal of nearly 100%. These results agreed with previous work suggesting that dust particules are odor carrier as the odor compounds probably adhere to the particles. The biofilters used were effective in removing particules in excess of 10 microns.

The odor emission reduction by dust removal is very interesting. This work however doesn’t give any information about the investment and operation cost of such biofilters as booster fans have to be used to push the ventilated air through the filters. Dust removal would be even more interesting if the dust inside the building could be controled to improve the inside conditions for swine and workers.

Harmful Gas and Odor Emissions under Use of Feed and Slurry Additives

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This investigation was done on a laboratory scale with manure samples for the “oxygen information” substances (quartz or chalk powder), the manure acidification treatment (using lactic acid) and the manure algae treatment. The investigation on the Bentonite feeding additive and the manure yeast treatment were done directly in pig housing. The laughing gas mentioned in the abstract is NO2. The “oxygen information” substances highly advertised and commonly used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland is apparently “equipped with oxygen information by means of cosmic energy”.
Further tests have to be done on a farm scale for the products that worked well in laboratory before recommendations could be done and the impact of manure acidification on soil and crop production has to be verified.
Odour reduction is claimed but no results are shown to confirm it.

County Human Health Concerns from Air Pollution

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The Renville County’s involvement in the Hydrogen sulfide testing of potential odor emission source is discussed as well as a proposed odor ordinance being developed by the county. Summaries of different U.S. studies are also presented on H2S and odor and their effect on health.

Caracterisation hedonistique des odeurs par la mesure des reactions neurovegetatives (Odor hedonics caracteristics by autonomic responses measurements)

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Experiments have been done to link the autonomic responses (such as cardio-respiratory frequency, skin potential, resistance, temperature blood flow) and the subjective verbal responses resulting of induced odors (pleasant and unpleasant ones). Each individual has preferred channels responses in one or two autonomic parameters and the protocol and equipment allowed the verification of these reactions and the classification of the individuals by their specific reactions.
The autonomic responses are more informative because they are more diversified than the verbal responses and give information about the affective state of the subject exposed to an odor. Also in some cases autonomic responses can be registered while the subject is not reporting odor detection. The proposed method can make the link between the subjective reactions obtained by the autonomic responses and the

Links are being made between odor perception and the affective state of the person exposed to a specific odor; links that are not often made with verbal comments. This is interesting because this type of research could better understand the affective reaction to long unpleasant odor exposure.

Fertilizing Cropland with Swine Manure

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Different aspects of manure management are presented as manure should be considered has nutritive to crops and has having an economic value. The important elements of manure valorization are presented such ad manure inventory assessment with manure sampling and testing to obtain the nutrients content. The methods are presented with averaged values of nutrients in manure. The application rates are also discussed and some attention should be put to the fact that nitrogen is not 100% available the first year and a certain portion of the N is going to be used the 2nd and the 3rd year and is also going to be lost. The necessity of a multi-year plan is also presented including in that plan spreading priority and follow up with crop rotations. An important element of manure management is the spreader calibration and calculation methods are presented for solid and liquid manure. Incorporation soon after spreading is still the best way to valorize the value of manure.

This article is general and present the necessity of manure management to assure that the nutrients available are well utilize and that manure application doesn’t result in losses of nitrogen in runoff and nitrates found in the water. Manure analysis should be done as the values presented in the document are not recent and changes have occur in the diet that have direct link to the nutrients content.