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Industry Partners
Prairie Swine Centre is an affiliate of the University of Saskatchewan
Prairie Swine Centre is grateful for the assistance of the George Morris Centre in developing the economics portion of Pork Insight.
Financial support for the Enterprise Model Project and Pork Insight has been provided by:
Industrialized Animal Production- A Major Source of Nutrient and Microbial Pollution to Aquatic Ecosystems
Posted in: Environment by admin on January 1, 2003 | No Comments
Composting Hog Manure – Is it Right for Your Farm?
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The concern of farm odor is forcing the industry to look at alternative methods of manure handling. Composting, while not completely odor free, is a good alternative. This provides soils with rich nutrients that chemical fertilizers cannot. In Biotech shelters, it is essential to mix the contents collected in order to obtain a thorough distribution of nutrients. Separation of manure using mechanical or chemical means or a combination of the two is necessary in liquid manure systems.
Decomposition is the process of the breaking down of organic material (when conditions are right – preferably warmer) by microbial organisms. Four key factors in decomposition include nutrient balance, moisture content, temperature, and aeration.
Proper composting requires proper equipment. This equipment must be able to prepare the site of composting. The improper sizing of compost turner equipment to perform the function can result in higher cost per ton of finished compost. Good compost sites must have adequate drainage and be a sufficient distance from areas of concern (such as towns, schools, etc.).
Soil Mixing to Decrease Surface Stratification of Phosphorus in Manured Soils
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THE IMPACT OF SWINE PRODUCTION ON LAND VALUES IN ILLINOIS
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RE-Cycle: A Profitable Swine Production System with Zero Waste
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Traditionally, swine production and crop production were tightly integrated. Swine were raised on crop residues, and their manure was a valuable fertilizer. Over the past 40 years, however, both crop producers and swine producers have moved away from this integration in an effort to reduce production costs. Crop producers prefer ‘pure’ fertilizers that are easy and accurate to spread, while swine producers prefer to hold animals in large groups in close proximity to feed mills and slaughter plants. Feed ingredients are often imported from distant regions making it financially prohibitive to return the highly dilute manure to the crop-growing areas. Thus, manure ends up being used locally, sometimes at application rates that exceed crop requirements.
This type of swine production has raised environmental concerns and some environmentalists push for a reintegration of crop and swine production through a return to much smaller, diversified family farms. Although components of the RE-Cycle system can facilitate such a movement, the RE-Cycle system is really meant as a solution for the environmental concerns of very large, integrated swine facilities.
The RE-Cycle system is designed to convert waste into value added products (Figure 1). Fecal material is converted into energy and ash. The energy can be captured in the form of electricity or a liquid fuel such as diesel or ethanol. The sterile ash has been successfully used as a mineral supplement in swine feed, eliminating phosphorus as an environmental concern. Nitrogen is recovered and processed into commercial grade nitrogen fertilizer, eliminating nitrogen as an environmental concern.
Incorporating Manure Into a Direct Seeding System
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The main concern, especially with large quantities of fresh solid or liquid manure, is where and when to competently dispose of it. Manure storage, handling and application don’t come without costs, can be a nuisance and can cause environmental problems. If you expect to use the manure as a crop nutrient as well you can run into even more problems. As nutrient loss in manure begins even before it is moved to the field it is hard to know how much nutrient value it actually contains. Depending on the condition of the manure, it may not contain a lot of nutrients, and tilling it into the soil may have little effect. Organic matter is the key to soil quality. Growers who use livestock manure on their fields will likely maintain and improve their soils quality beyond those who continually deplete organic matter through tilling and exporting. There are alternatives to field spreading and incorporating raw manure into the soil. Injection of liquid manure with low disturbance works and composting solid manure or feeding cattle in the field reduces handling. Direct seeding is intended to handle increased crop residue and surface organic matter, as you don’t have to till manure into the soil to reap its benefits. Another alternative is to change spreading habits to allow for less tillage.
Alberta’s new Agricultural Operation Practices Act contains specific requirements for manure management. This means that producers need a good understanding of manure composition and nutrient content and that soil testing, record keeping and application rate restrictions now apply in some cases.
Environmental Benefits of Livestock Manure Management Practices and Technology by Life Cycle Assessment
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An environmentalLife Cycle Assessment (LCA) procedure is constructed to compare the total emissions from different techniques for managing livestock wastes. Life Cycle Assessment is a method of holistically and systematically accounting for the environmental benefits and burdens of the production of goods and services including consequential burdens generated elsewhere. As waste emissions are very variable, the methodology is extended to include the uncertainty in the estimates in order to indicate the significance of differences between techniques. The object is to inform policy of whether options are better for the environment by quantifying potentialemissions abatement, by highlighting priority environmentalimpac ts and by revealing compromises for further investigation.
This paper reports comparative LCAs for severalpig waste management options. For example, various
slurry application techniques, including: splash plates, band spreaders and injection. If the splash-plate system is taken as a reference, the injector system causes only 64% of the environmental acidification and 71% of the eutrophication of surface waters. The benefits must be offset against the increase in nitrate leaching of 50%. In contrast, the band spreader system offers 28% of the benefits of injection. The environmentalimpac ts have also been expressed as a proportion of the UK nationalemissions . This gives each impact a weighted-value that enables direct comparisons of disparate impacts. Although band spreader systems showed an aggregated, or total, environmental impact reduction of almost 10%, the reduction is not significant when uncertainty is taken into account. Using an anaerobic digester shows few overall benefits due to the fugitive losses of methane. However, if these can be eliminated the global warming potential from waste management is reduced close to zero.
Born in Canada and Raised in the USA
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Premium Pork is a farrow to finish system with over 40,000 sows in Canada that finishes all of its commercial hogs in the United States. Reasons for doing this includes cheap feed for finishing hogs in the USA, better packer-producer relationships in the USA, low health status due to low pig density in Canada, decline of the Canadian dollar, and country of origin labeling. Premium Pork has built partners with local farmers, partners with packers, uses Genetiporc genetics (Quebec genetics company), has American grow-finish partners, treats employees well, and has a relationship with several Canadian nutrition companies. Using tight biosecurity regulations, good food safety procedures (such as HACCP), environmentally sound and quality production practices, Premium Pork has grown into the second largest sow herd in Canada.