Farmers can recycle scrap iron into tools, straw bales into houses and manure into fertilizer.
A southern Alberta farmer now wants to recycle the exhaust from his tractor into the ground in an effort to lower harmful greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the amount of fertilizer needed to grow a crop.
Gary Lewis of Cowley believes recycling carbon dioxide from his tractor exhaust through the hoses of his air drill will have the same positive effect on the growth of his crops as does pumping carbon dioxide into greenhouses.
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“Last year we cooled down the emissions and put them through the air drill and we were experimenting growing our crops with the emissions from our tractor. There is no harm to it because CO2 is what comes off organic matter to feed microbial activity,” said Lewis, who hopes to patent the process.
“If we could burn our own fuel and return all those emissions back to the soil, we’d have no emissions and we could use it as plant nutrition.”
While he’s gathered only a small amount of research data, he said crops grown last year with just engine exhaust grew as well as crops where fertilizer was used, some twice as well. He hopes his process will reduce farmers’ dependence on fertilizer and fuel.
“There’s experimental development of equipment and scientific observations,” Lewis said.
“Once we learn about what reactions we’re observing, then we can get more scientific research done.”
Darrel Carlisle of Brandon is one of nine farmers in Canada who are testing the equipment and conducting scientific observations to document the process’s effectiveness. He said the challenge has been to create equipment that will cool the exhaust enough so the hot air can be pumped through air drill hoses without melting the equipment or harming the seed.
“The end result is to produce more grain for less cost per acre,” said Carlisle, whose large air cooler mounted on his air drill has turned many farmers’ heads as they drive past the farm.
Once the exhaust leaves the two by two by 14 foot cooling chamber, it is forced into the air drill hoses and pushes the seed and fertilizer down the hoses into the ground.
“The challenge is knowing how to sufficiently cool that exhaust,” he said.
In the past, Lewis has rerouted exhaust from his stationary irrigation motor into a plant nutrient solution, which was irrigated onto his crops. He’s also experimented with diverting exhaust from his rototiller into garden soil.
With growing concern about how greenhouse gases harm the environment, Lewis hopes his work will become noticed.
“Your engine is changing diesel fuel into oxidized emissions, which are better to be in the soil than in the atmosphere.”
Ben Ellert, a research scientist specializing in biogeo chemistry at Agriculture Canada’s research centre in Lethbridge, doesn’t know how much carbon dioxide would stay in the soil if it was placed only a few centimetres deep using seeding equipment.
“I can’t envision a process where you would retain a great deal of that carbon in the soils.”
He said soil is already richer in carbon dioxide than the surrounding air, which contains about 360 parts per million of carbon dioxide compared to 10,000 ppm in soil.
While Ellert has studied the exchange of carbon dioxide between soil and the atmosphere during traditional tillage, he hasn’t examined the technology that Lewis is promoting.
