Perdue Agri Recycle Ltd. is an example of how a company can find markets for chicken manure.
Three years ago, the firm opened the world’s largest manure recycling plant in Seaford, Delaware, to manage waste from the world’s largest concentration of poultry operations in the DelMar Peninsula.
“Manure was the first fertilizer and it’s still the best,” said Tom Ferguson, general manager of Perdue AgriRecycle, a joint venture company with Perdue Farms and the first of its kind to convert surplus poultry litter into organic fertilizer pellets formulated for precision agriculture.
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While mid-western states grow, sell and export corn and soybeans along with their nutrients, the East Coast has too much nitrogen from its many chicken farms.
Ferguson said Perdue packages those nutrients in a pelletized, pasteurized pathogen-free form that can be shipped back to the farms and used in traditional fertilizer spreaders.
It’s a success story for the Perdue pellet company, which has increased sales by 30 percent a year.
Ferguson was reached in Orlando, Florida, where he was looking to make sales to golf course superintendents, whose courses were hard hit by recent hurricanes and flooding.
Perdue’s other markets include crop farms, horticultural operations and home gardeners.
Pelleting starts with a two-week process of anaerobically composting manure taken from Perdue Farms’ chicken barns. It is then screened and restacked before being dried down to about 10 percent moisture and turned into rabbit-food sized pellets.
Ferguson said heating in the compost piles kills pathogens.
