AGRICULTURAL WASTE TREATMENT

The production of livestock and poultry animals, also known as animal agriculture, is important to the economic well-being of the nation, producing $100 billion per year in farm revenue. This production also contributes to the viability of many rural communities and the sustainability of an adequate food supply for the American public.

However, concern over pollution resulting from intensive livestock and poultry production—in which large numbers of animals are held in confined production facilities—has increased in recent years. Nationwide, about 130 times more animal waste(1) is produced than human waste—roughly 5 tons for every U.S. citizen—and some operations with hundreds of thousands of animals producing as much waste as a good sized city.

As shown below, agricultural waste is one of the largest segments of the nationewide waste problem.

These large volumes of agricultural waste threaten surface water and groundwater quality in the event of waste spills, leakage from waste storage facilities, and runoff from fields on which an excessive amount of waste has been applied as fertilizer.

Furthermore, as animal production is increasingly concentrated in larger operations and in certain regions of the country, commonly used animal waste management practices are proving to no longer adequate for preventing water pollution.

Within the agricultural waste sector, manure from a variety of livestock and poultry constitutes the largest problem as shown below.

It is known that with the limited digestion of intensively raised animals:

Dairy cows retain only about 20% of nitrogen (N) and 25% of phosphorus (P); pigs about 35% N and 33% P; and chickens 45% N and 20% P from their feed(2).

The rest ends up as manure, wasted in the environment, causing high nutrient levels in the nation's waterways and resulting in "dead zones" in many of these valuable water resources.

Land degradation from animal waste is also a major problem. Much of the waste is spread on surrounding lands at rates vastly exceeding its capacity to use the nutrients. On a world scale nitrogen losses from manured agricultural lands into fresh water amounts to more than 12 million tonnes. Phosphorus leaching is in the order of 1.5 million tonnes (2).

 

A substantial amount of the nitrogen comes from chemical fertilizers and the phosphorous from mineral sources and is added to rather than recycled from the world's ecosystems.

Consequently, new waste management practices are needed, including alternative uses for waste, new means of treating waste, and improved methods of moving waste to cropland where it can be used as fertilizer.

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(1)Animal waste generally refers to manure but also includes wastewater, urine, bedding, poultry litter,and animal carcasses.

(2) Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, Cess de Haan. "Livestock's long shadow: environmental issues and options". LEAD/FAO publication 2006.

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THERE IS A SOLUTION!

An ideal solution to this massive(and growing) problem would be to

OUR NEW VAPOR COMPRESSION DISTILLER TECHNOLOGY ACCOMPLISHES BOTH OBJECTIVES!

OPERATIONAL OVERVIEW

Manure from a broad spectrum of commercial or privately owned agricultural enterprises can be processed to yield high quality water for both animal and equipment use as well as providing a biologically clean, liquid fertilizer high in nitrogen, phosphates and other nutrients that were only partially used by the cattle, swine or chickens. Many of the nutrients available from this on-site process can replace increasingly expensive chemical-based fertilizers for food production on the same farm.

The new technology illustrated above will open doors to a vastly improved and more cost-effective means by which agricultural wastes are handled ON-SITE and returned to useful productivity at the agricultural site itself.

It is important to understand that up until now, distillation(and reverse osmosis) have been unable to deal with waste processes in an efficient manner, particularly when the dissolved solid content is high as it will be in agricultural wastes.

All of that has now changed!

PRECONDITIONING TO SEPARATE SOLID MATERIALS: A wide variety of methods are available to "precondition" the solid waste materials and remove solids and organic(chemical) compounds prior to the distillation process. Liquids comprise the dominant portion of animal manure and the first step is to eliminate the small fraction of the incoming material that is particulate or non-soluable in nature.

VAPOR COMPRESSION DISTILLATION : Distillation uses the combined processes of evaporation and cooling to separate materials with higher molecular weights as well as dissolved solids from water. Compared to conventional or even commercial reverse osmosis, this newest generation of vapor compression distiller technology can deal with dissolved solids up to three times that encountered in seawater.

The dissolved material is left behind as a "concentrate" and flushed from the distiller as useable, biologically clean liquid fertilizer.

Meanwhile, a considerable amount of pure, distilled water is now available for watering cattle, swine or chickens or for use in farm implement radiators, batteries, etc.

High efficiency, counter-flow heat exchange as well as the use of vapor compression for more effective condensation of the pure water product reduces the operational cost of this type of system to fractions of a penny per gallon.

Imagine being able to produce a useable, clean liquid fertilizer product for your fields(or animal feed lots for re-use and more efficient overall nutrient absorption) which does not contain toxic chemicals and which today would cost you twice what it did a year or so ago if you purchased it from the "feed, seed and fertilizer" enterprise in the nearby city.

Your income statement will thank you!

In short, every part of the dominant, liquid portion of the manure is now recycled back into both useful and nutrative functions for use in the agricultural enterprise.

As illustrated in one of the pictures above, one of the current methods of managed, manure disposal include spreading it on croplands. However, uneven or excessive applications burn crops in their formative stages or are washed off the surface as solid materials which then can end up polluting commercial waterways.

The distilled water can also be used to dilute the distiller "waste" water stream of liquid fertilizer to the required level to maximize crop nutrient support.

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We leave you with these thoughts:

The volume of livestock manure is mind-bogglingly huge. On a weight basis, the mass of cattle exceeds that of the whole human race.
As a consequence, the volume of manure produced by these animals also exceeds that produced by the human race.

While many of these cattle are widely distributed over range lands, a growing and significant proportion of them are kept in intensive feedlots. Add to this 19 billion chickens and pigs, the majority of which are kept in intensive production facilities, the amount of manure is gargantuan and concentrated in relatively small areas of land.

It has to go somewhere: some is dried and used for fuel, much is spread on farming land as fertilizer and some escapes directly into water run off. Which ever way it goes within two years or so, it ends up by adding huge amounts of nutrients to rivers which along with the run off of fertilizer residues causes major problems with eutrophication (excessive nutrient).

1.5 billion cattle/buffalo + 17.5 billion poultry + 1.8 bllion sheep/goats + 1 billion pigs.

Remember, you don't need to be a "hands-on" farmer looking for a smart solution to an expanding problem on your operation to call us - you might be an entrepreneur who sees this type of technology as a future enterprise where leasing or renting such equipment(it can be built to be containerized and therefore easily transported anywhere in the world)to large or small agricultural operations. If this appeals to the "green" side of your business world as well as providing a highly profitable revenue stream where one did not exist in the past,

CALL US.

START A NEW "GREEN" BUSINESS TODAY - WITH TECHNOLOGY THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS NOT EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT!

INTERNATIONAL CALLS: 1-805-773-4502; FAX: 1-805-773-4502