
Read the
magazine
story to find out more. Better Way To
Deal With Cattle RunoffBy David
Elstein April 14, 2003Eliminating odors from cattle waste
runoff is only one advantage of a new, environmentally friendly system
developed by Agricultural Research
Service scientists in Nebraska to handle animal waste. Another benefit of
the new system is reduced costs for farmers, since the nutrients will flow from
lagoons onto nearby fields to fertilize hay. The feedlot at ARS' Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) in Clay Center, Neb., is situated on
top of a foothill. Rainfall runoff from a series of pens within this feedlot is
directed to a small basin that runs the length of the pens. The runoff collects
in the basin for a short period of time, allowing the solid particles to
settle. The runoff is then discharged to a hayfield, where the water and
nutrients are "recycled" to help the hay grow without any additional
water or nutrients. The retained solids have to be removed from the basin once a year. But these
solids are spread on cornfields as fertilizer, thereby "recycling"
them back to the production system. Cattle's bodies cannot utilize all the nitrogen, phosphorus and other
nutrients contained in their feed, and the excess winds up in the animals'
manure. But with the new system, these underutilized nutrients can be put to
work as fertilizer to help grow the thousands of acres of corn and hay that are
planted each year as food for the MARC cattle. This not only saves money on
commercial fertilizer costs, but also helps keep nutrients such as nitrogen out
of water supplies by reusing those nutrients as fertilizer, rather than letting
them wash away to nearby streams or other bodies of water. In the three years
that agricultural engineers have studied the system, there has been no runoff
of nitrogen or animal wastewater from the hayfields to the surrounding area.
More information about this research can be found in the
April issue of
Agricultural Research magazine. ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency. U.S. Department of Agriculture |