Posted at the Crave Brothers Farm near Waterloo, WI, a skematic shows visitors how a biodigester works. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)From a column in The Reporter (Fond du Lac) by Paul Dyk, UW-Extension dairy and livestock agent for Fond du Lac County:
I have an allure to manure.
Do you?
Surely nothing can be more appropriate in the final days of the political season.
You see the candidate, you hear the things they say, you hear the word "change" used as a noun, verb, adjective and pronoun; and yet, something smells not quite right.
Farmers have been dealing with manure for thousands of years. There is, of course, a stigma that has been applied to manure. It doesn't bring up favorable images. Think of the human equivalent.
Maybe agriculture needs to adopt some new names like animal septic systems, animal byproducts, green fertilizer or food byproducts. The farmer slang of "honey wagon" (yep, that's a wagon used to haul manure) seems like a good start, but I doubt folks off the farm will ever adopt that endearing term.
So what draws me to manure?
I am putting together a conference based on manure handling. It is fascinating the technology that is developing around manure. (OK, I know I am one of the few in the county that gets giddy when talking about manure technology.)
Private industry and agricultural producers are tackling manure issues with new and old technology.
One such technology is manure digesters, which have been around for a few years in Wisconsin. They let manure heat and produce methane. The methane is usually converted on the farm to electricity and sold back to the grid. New technology is cleaning and converting the methane to produce saleable products.
The fate of the remaining pathogen-free biosolids varies from farm to farm. They may be be used for bedding cattle (yep, that's recycling). Some biosolids are being sold to the potting/horticulture industry. And now there is ongoing research that points to the possibility of producing building products (like 2 by 4's and 4 by 8 sheets of "plywood") from these fibrous biosolids.
There is also some groundbreaking work being done in Wisconsin to filter and clean the water from manure. Like human sanitation systems, the goal is to produce clean, dischargeable water. This would be safe for the environment and public. For the farmer, it would vastly reduce handling costs (manure is about 88 percent water).
Dyk can be contacted at 929-3170 or e-mail paul.dyk@ces.uwex.edu.
