
Research Center Churning Farm Waste Into CompostBy
Don Comis May
28, 1998In its first nine months of operation, the
Agricultural Research Service's new
compost facility has "harvested" about 2,500 tons of compost at the
agency's Beltsville, Md., Agricultural
Research Center. The compost is made from manure, livestock bedding, old
livestock feed and greenhouse and landscape waste from the 7,000-acre research
center outside Washington, DC. The center uses its homegrown compost for landscaping mulch, supplemental
fertilizer for growing crops, and for research, saving an estimated $13,000 a
year in reduced landfill fees and lower commercial fertilizer and mulch use. Business at the compost facility is brisk. During the first week of May,
about 40 trucks brought in 260 cubic yards of these materials, including 120
cubic yards of manure and 64 cubic yards of bedding in one day. During summer, the facility expects the truck traffic to continue, unloading
hundreds of tons of manure and bedding from its barns and pens. The 2-acre composting facility is bordered by 8 acres of orchardgrass
designed to filter out any nutrients that might wash off the 77,000-square foot
composting pad. The orchardgrass is harvested four times a year for hay that is
fed to the cattle and used as bedding. Manure and used bedding come back to the
pad. The 8-inch-thick pad, made partly from coal ash and cement kiln dust, holds
about 900 tons of composting materials at any given time. BARC scientists use the composting facility to investigate potential "designer
composts"--blends of farm, industrial, and urban materials--for solving
particular problems such as crop diseases. An in-depth story about the composting facility appears in the May issue of
Agricultural Research magazine. The story also is on the World Wide Web
at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/may98/comp0598.htm Scientific contact: Lawrence J. Sikora,
ARS Soil Microbial Systems
Laboratory, Beltsville, Md., phone (301) 504-9384, fax 504-9370, [email protected]. U.S. Department of Agriculture | |