Researchers in Saskatchewan intend to keep the manure from flying.
Air travel via a manure spreader is the usual, final mode of transport for solid livestock manure, which represents 70 percent of all North American livestock waste.
University of Saskatchewan engineers are developing a less aggressive method of delivering manure to the field.
Besides providing variable field application of solid wastes, manure spreaders also release large amounts of volatile fatty acids into the air, causing smells. The odour is due to the violent shredding and tossing of material and the time it takes the manure on the soil surface to degrade or be incorporated.
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Besides the smell, spreading manure on the surface may mean it pollutes water or loses nutrients before it gets in the soil.
One answer for liquid manure is injection into the soil, but injection of solid waste has had little research until recently.
Claude Lague of the U of S engineering college said his department started studying the placement of solid manures in 2001.
With limited funding from the Alberta and federal governments, the researchers began by establishing exactly what constitutes solid waste.
“It’s highly variable. That’s part of the problem,” Lague said.
The material can be moist or dry; it can be made up mainly of bedding straw or almost entirely of feces.
“We made a very thorough study of the manure types. Different species, management practices, it is a complex issue and this might explain why there is almost no study of it in the past,” Lague said.
The college built a three-metre wide solid manure injector prototype to field test various theories.
Auger type, screw conveyors move the material out of the tank to a transversely mounted screw conveyor that distributes the load to hydraulically operated metering gates that drop the manure in neat rows.
The manure could then be mixed with the surface soil or buried.
“We have the laying-out-the-manure-in-rows part of the system working pretty well. The challenge now is to develop a method of opening the ground, creating a cavity for the solid waste, placing the manure and packing the soil after it, all in one pass,” he said.
Lague said his department plans to have a method to inject the solid material by spring, and with help from the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, build a field-scale prototype to begin testing the new design.
He said the only serious stumbling block for the new equipment has been attracting a farm machinery manufacturer partner.
“We’ve approached many of the main-line companies. So far they tell us it is short-line technology and they aren’t interested in funding the research.
“This will be big, though,” he said.
There is little doubt that manure is at the top of many legislators’ agendas across North America.
Lague said the university’s approach will meet the ever tightening regulatory requirements for livestock producers.
The university intends to license the technology to manufacturers once it is developed.
