The struggle of touting hundreds of 40 kilogram bags of lime through narrow barn corridors to treat manure pits and the health hazards to humans and livestock when dealing with dry lime are what motivated a Manitoba threesome to invent their award-winning Lime Solutions Application Machine. Essentially, the machine creates a concentrated liquid lime solution that is sprayed on barn slat floors, as well as on manure pit walls and floors after the pits have been rinsed and drawn down, and before a new group of hogs is brought into the barn room. Less lime is required when the pits are drawn down. “This method is an economical way to deal with some of the nasty, hard to eradicate diseases that are floating around inside barns,” says Hytek director of capital development, Wilf Sawatzy. The designers started with a common, commercial sprayer implement and simply removed the spray booms. Initially, employees simply poured the bagged lime into the sprayer tank, but they now use an auger with a bag cutting device at the in-feed to both reduce the amount of manual labor required to handle the heavy bags and the health risk of coming into contact with the lime. A pallet of dry lime bags is delivered to the machine’s location. The 500 to 800 gallon tank is filled with water, and an employee begins placing lime bags in the auger basket where the bag cutter is located. The dry lime is then augered into the tank. The agitation pump removes the liquid from one end of the tank and replaces it at the other end to ensure there is enough agitation so the lime can mix evenly and is not allowed to settle. Hytek uses a three horsepower, gas-powered, three inch Honda pump to agitate the tank mixture. Another three horsepower, two inch Honda pump propels the concentrated lime mixture through a hose to the barn. Hytek has tested and settled on specific nozzles that provide the company with a spray pattern that delivers the best results. Hytek is currently applying the concentrated lime on a room-by-room basis between hog finishing cycles. Because the lime is in liquid form, it does not irritate hogs in other rooms, as was the case when Hytek applied dry lime to the pits. Therefore, a complete barn evacuation during an application is not required. Also, the lime does not clump up in the manure slurry and a concentrated liquid stream is easier for the operator to control. After pre-washing of a manure pit, it takes about 2.5 hours to complete an application in a nursery room of 600 hogs. Hytek has no plans to commercialize the system and is happy to share the system’s design with anyone who inquires.