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Solving an Age-Old Problem
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Poultry growers and dairy producers in the Shenandoah Valley are hoping to help improve the environment and enhance their bottom lines with some innovative organic resource management.
Organic resources from animal agriculture, a.k.a. poultry litter and livestock manure, have been identified as significant contributors to decreased water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Finding solutions to manage the excess nutrients in these resources is critical to the area’s economy, environment, and society.
Foster Agblevor and Jactone Arogo Ogejo, researchers in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, are hoping their technological approaches will produce effective and profitable solutions to this age-old problem of nutrient management.
Their research is part of a concentrated effort by Virginia Tech researchers, Virginia Cooperative Extension specialists and agents, conservation organizations, state agencies, and private industry to determine the most effective means to support the agricultural community and manage the excess nutrients in the Shenandoah Valley. The research is being funded by a $1 million grant from the
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Chesapeake Bay Targeted Watershed Program.
Agblevor is working with poultry growers to test technology that would convert poultry litter to pyrodiesel (bio-oil), producer gas, and fertilizer. His research uses a portable pyrolysis unit to convert the poultry litter into the three valueadded byproducts. The pyrolysis unit heats the litter until it vaporizes. The vapor is then condensed to produce the bio-oil, and a slow release fertilizer is recovered from the reactor. The gas that is produced can then be used to operate the pyrolysis unit, making it a self-sufficient system.
According to Agblevor, the volume of the poultry litter is reduced by 60 percent using this process with 40 percent converted to bio-oil, 40 percent converted to a slow release fertilizer, and 20 percent converted into a producer gas.
When the project is at full capacity, Agblevor expects to convert 100,000 tons of litter each year to bio-oil and other products, removing 5.8 million pounds of phosphorus and 5 million tons of nitrogen from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
Innovative nutrient removal techniques are needed on dairy farms as well, as they face increasing land shortages for appropriate land application of manure and pressure to expand their operations to remain economically viable. Arogo is testing an on-farm nutrient removal reactor to concentrate 40 percent of the phosphorus (approximately 24 pounds of phosphorus per year per cow) from dairy manure using struvite crystallization.
The ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus in non-processed manure is much higher than what crops actually need. When the manure is applied to the soil, the soil is saturated with phosphorus, which runs off into surface waters. Arogo’s challenge is to capture and isolate some of phosphorus from the manure and leave the majority of nitrogen in place, making the remaining organic resource more environmentally sound.
The phosphorus byproduct (struvite) that is created through the crystallization process has many uses. It can be used as a slow release fertilizer, in the manufacture of cleaning products, as a raw material for the phosphate industry, in the making of fire-resistant panels, and as a binding material in cements.
In addition to refining and demonstrating the various technologies,
the researchers are also looking at expanding opportunities for marketing the value-added products – struvite, pyrolsis char (slow release fertilizer), and compost – by coordinating the purchase and
sale of these products through a nutrient broker.
“This ‘market maker’ will help identify markets for these materials and help develop a marketing plan,” says Arogo. “The establishment of markets for these products is critical to the adaptation of these technologies and to sustain nitrogen and phosphorus reduction in the watershed.”
The researchers and Extension faculty members are also conducting educational programs about their respective processes to better inform producers about the technologies and how the producers might incorporate them into their operations.