Hog producers who want to reduce odours from their barns and lagoons can borrow millions of dollars, build a biodigester and hope to find a use for the product.
Or they can find low-tech additives that work within the manure to make it smell less and become better fertilizer.
A company working with major livestock operations in heavily urbanized areas thinks the latter approach is more likely to pay off.
“We want to put healthy manure back on the land,” said Derek Pratt of Penergetic Canada, a company that markets an additive that can be mixed into hog manure and slurry in barns to encourage aerobic breakdown.
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Pratt said he doubts that biodigesters, which manipulate manure to produce useful gases and trap them, will catch on without major continuing subsidies.
Even though Manitoba’s Clean Environment Commission suggested biodigesters would help alleviate the waste problem on Manitoba farms, Pratt said, few have the money to build them.
A better way to reduce odour and improve manure’s fertilizer quality is to drastically increase the aerobic breakdown of manure, he said. That way the production of foul gases that appall urban people will be drastically reduced in barns and lagoons without a major investment.
Pratt’s company sells Swiss-made additives that can be used in barns and lagoons to treat slurry.
Straw covers and aeration are only minimally effective, Pratt said, and can merely hide the problem. The real need is to reduce the anaerobic gas production that occurs when oxygen is not reaching manure.
Pratt said Quebec hog producers have been quick to embrace aerobic additives to alleviate the hostility they face from neighbouring cities, as do chicken producers in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
The Manitoba government’s hog barn moratorium for the Winnipeg region has revealed just how damaging urban anger can be to a livestock industry, Pratt said. Farmers can’t ignore the situation and need to accept that hog manure odour is becoming a growing irritant.
“You’re seen as the skunk in the room,” he said.
“If there wasn’t the smell, the industry wouldn’t be visible and you wouldn’t be the target of things like the Clean Environment Commission. People assume there’s something wrong. You kind of set yourself up as someone to be attacked. You need to do something about that smell, but it needs to be affordable.”
