The process not only provides faster treatment than using lagoons, but also significantly reduces concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and therefore the need for as much farmland to dispose of treated waste water.

“The best thing about our system is that it is natural,” said Mai Ann Healy, business development manager for BioFiltro, a Chilean company with offices in California.

“We are using these nutrients generated by cows to feed more animals, in this case, microbes and bacteria to earthworms — it’s that simple,” she said. “We are using a technology that is billions of years old that is tried and proven by Mother Nature.”

The rapid treatment process using earthworms is called BIDA, and the company’s first commercial-scale system in North America was installed on Royal Dairy, a 5,000-cow operation located between Spokane and Seattle that produces about 750,000 litres of waste water. The dairy used to need 1,600 hectares to dispose of its effluent water, but now only needs about 120 hectares. It also saves the farm about US$300,000 annually on trucking costs, said owner Austin Allred, adding the system, which cost a couple of million, will pay for itself in about five years.

He first heard about the BIDA system at a farm show in California.

“Really what they claimed to be able to do seemed almost too good to be true. The amount of nitrogen that they claimed to be able to remove didn’t seem realistic,” said Allred, adding he would now recommend it to other farms.How it works

The entire installation is enclosed within either a concrete or steel structure, with a network of sensors and control panels tracking the system’s performance and water quality parameters. The effluent first passes through a separator to reduce suspended solids to 2,000 milligrams per litre. (The solids can be reused as bedding or sold.) The waste water then goes to a tank where sensors monitor constituents such as pH and flow, and then to an irrigation system which deposits it on the surface of the BIDA system.

It then trickles through layers of wood shavings, river cobble, and drainage basins before the final discharge. BioFiltro says the process takes just four hours, and the bioreactor is virtually odourless and requires minimum storage capacity.

As part of the installation, a mix of worms and bacteria are added to the wood shavings media. These are naturally occurring, local species of earthworms. The burrowing worms create air channels, digest suspended solids, and achieve densities of 15,700 worms per cubic metre while working symbiotically with bacteria to create a biofilm. This biofilm is what captures and digests the contaminants from the liquid waste.

The high density of earthworms per cubic metre keeps the temperature in the system elevated so it keeps working during winter. It has worked effectively in Washington down to -10 C and is removing 86 per cent of the nitrogen, 84 per cent of the phosphorus, and 94 per cent of total suspended solids in the effluent.

Over time, the earthworms produce castings that they then push to the surface. So the top 26 centimetres of the installation is excavated about every year and a half, and the plan at the dairy is to sell the castings as a soil amendment.

The system not only works for dairy, but for any farm or business generating a biological liquid waste stream, said Healy.

The post Waste not, want not — a different way to treat farm effluent appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Alberta’s first wooden grain elevator was constructed in 1895 and at the peak in the 1930s, there were nearly 1,800 of them. Today, there are only 88 left, more falling victim to demolition every year.

More than 5,000 wooden grain elevators across the Prairies have been torn down. That represents a lot of wood but where most people would see construction waste destined for the landfill, Lincoln Dobson saw an opportunity. Over the last 20 years, the owner of Last Mountain Timber in Buena Vista, Sask., has salvaged 1.6 million board feet of industrial old-growth timbers from demolished buildings. His best source has been wooden grain elevators, including some in Alberta.

“After high school, I started tree planting in Western Canada and could see the logging clearcuts, which kind of disturbed me,” said Dobson. “I have a love of nature and wondered what I could do to help the forest in addition to planting trees.”

The structural components of elevators and old industrial buildings that his company salvages are anywhere from 40 to 110 years old. The old-growth Douglas fir, western larch, spruce and pine timbers are sometimes used in new timber frame building construction. But more often, the surfaces on the square beams are carefully sawn to remove the grey weathered exterior appearance and then custom sawn. They’re used in homes, cabins, and commercial buildings, or for furniture.

The company, which does work across the country and in the U.S., recently installed a 20-foot-long 12×14 timber (with matching posts) at the entrance to Jiffy Lube’s headquarters in Edmonton.

It was Dobson’s father, who was in the building demolition business, who alerted him to the fact that old wooden grain elevators were being torn down all across the Prairies.

“There were some summers when I was getting like a grain elevator a week and dealing with five or six demolition companies,” said Dobson.

The company has salvaged timbers from 205 grain elevators. But like old-growth forests, it is becoming harder and harder to find industrial timbers from demolition projects, as the transition to concrete grain storage silos is almost complete.

“Now it is in its twilight,” he said.

Last year, there were only three elevator demolition projects, and Dobson said he expects those may be the last of them.

The post Gone from the skyline, parts of Prairie sentinels live on appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

You’re not alone.

Alberta is experiencing a significant dieback of one of its most abundant species, and while some landowners are skeptical of the cause, evidence points to climate change as one possible contributor.

A massive poplar dieback is occurring throughout North America and this is only part of the problem. Where it is dying, it’s not growing back.

Whether the dieback is positive or a negative from a farming perspective depends on your point of view.

Some landowners have chosen to convert land where dieback is occurring into pasture, said Toso Bozic, a provincial agroforestry specialist. But from an environmental, water retention, fire hazard and forestry perspective, it’s not good news, he added.

Trembling aspen, commonly called white poplar, is the most widely distributed wood species in North America and is a commercially important hardwood species that grows throughout Alberta. It is more abundant in the northern half of the province but there are about 3.4 million hectares of privately owned forests in Alberta that are pure or mixed-wood aspen stands. That’s about 70 per cent of the entire privately owned forest in the province.

Some landowners stand to lose a lot of money from this dieback as producers of oriented strand board (OSB) and pulp source between 10 and 20 per cent of their wood supply annually from private land in the province. That works out to between two million and three million tonnes of aspen.

Shelleen Gerbig has witnessed aspen dieback first hand, both as a farmer and a scientist with SARDA Ag Research, a non-profit organization directed by farmers in the municipal districts of Smoky River, Big Lakes, Greenview, and Northern Sunrise County.

“Our farmyard has a lot of bush around it and is experiencing huge dieback of the aspen,” said Gerbig, who farms about 2,000 hectares near Falher.

The farm has one fully forested quarter section, and a number of poplars growing on fencelines and in their yard.

“Some of those trees are just old, but there is no regenerating growth, like nothing underneath to replace it. That’s also pretty much consistent with our fencelines.”

To compensate for the loss, they have planted mainly spruce as a replacement species.

Aspen dieback is widespread throughout the Peace Region, she said based on her observations while travelling for work.

“You notice it everywhere,” said Gerbig. “The trees just do not look healthy.”

However, aspen dieback isn’t necessarily being viewed as a negative by local landowners.

“Where we are farming, they are still in the (land) clearing mode,”she said. “So a dead tree is a good tree.”

But much of the land suffering aspen dieback is on marginal land, and having trees on that land is beneficial for neighbouring cropland.

“One thing that I think people should be concerned about is the loss of those natural areas where the natural pollinators and wildlife live,” she said.

What’s causing the dieback isn’t known, but climate change could be a factor, said Bozic.

“Based on the weather data I’ve reviewed, it would appear that climate change — resulting in more frost-free days and a drier climate — along with several other contributing factors is resulting in the aspen dieback issue in Alberta.”

He points to data assembled by University of Lethbridge researchers that shows the province’s weather is getting warmer, the growing season longer, the number of frost days declining, and the number of days of -10 C or lower only half of what it was in 1950. (The researchers used nearly five million Environment Canada daily temperature recordings from 6,833 locations across the province from 1950 and 2010 to create the Alberta Climate Records website: abrecords.cfapps.io.)

In terms of dieback in the Peace Region, Gerbig isn’t convinced that warming temperatures are to blame. Chemical drift could be killing aspens along fencelines and there is significantly less forest being harvested for firewood, so there is less removal of older trees than in past years. Disease could also be an issue, she said.

Whatever the cause, dieback is not only occurring along fencelines and in yards, but in the middle of large woodlots and there is little regeneration taking place.

And it’s not just Peace Country being affected.

The Canadian Forest Service has been monitoring dieback in Alberta’s aspen forest since the mid-1990s, and also has 30 aspen research and monitoring sites across Western Canada, Ontario, and the Northwest Territories.

More than half the aspen tagged on these sites since 2000 are now dead, and the number of trees growing to replace them is in decline, said Mike Michaelian, a forest health technician and researcher with the forest service.

He points to two other factors that could partly explain the dieback.

“The northern half of Alberta has been exceptionally dry since 2000, with 2015 being one of the driest years in many parts of northern Alberta in probably more than 80 years,” he says. “We’ve also had a forest tent caterpillar infestation.”

This has increased the severity, speed, and extent of aspen dieback, he said.

As this dieback trend is expected to continue, Bozic suggests landowners survey their woodlots and put a plan in place to harvest wood before it loses its commercial value. This could include selling wood for production of bioenergy. The income could be used to implement a woodlot regeneration, although some landowners may choose to convert that land to agriculture production, he said.

On the positive side, aspen is a suckering species and new growth is more resilient. However, in some areas, particularly along the southern fringe of the aspen forest, there is no guarantee that an aspen stand will regenerate itself and may revert to a prairie landscape.

Landowners might want to plant coniferous species in the understorey, turning a pure aspen stand into a more resilient and valuable mixed-wood forest, said Bozic.

The post Alberta’s most abundant tree species under threat appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

After reading what Caroline-area farmer Will Vohs has discovered, landowners may want to think twice before signing over their woodlots too quickly.

That’s because Vohs says he can manufacture a 12-inch by 12-inch by 20-foot timber on his band sawmill and sell it for about $250 compared to the $50 to $100 per raw log that forest companies wanted to pay him 10 years ago. And raw log prices have gone down since then, he said.

The idea to custom cut his own wood products occurred to Vohs when he agreed to sell some standing timber to a forest company to raise some cash. He and his family purchased 2-1/2 sections about a half-hour west of Innisfail after immigrating to Canada in the 1970s.

In Europe, private forests are highly valued and Vohs recognized the value of the woodlot on their new home — which they named Valley of Hope Farm. While most of their land was converted to pasture, they left a half section as a woodlot.

Over the years, they developed a successful cattle business. But Vohs encountered a series of unfortunate circumstances involving drought and one of their cows being diagnosed with BSE in 2003. He and his partners decided to wind down their 130-head, pure Charolais cattle herd in 2005.

That gave him time to try something new, which turned out to be custom raising cattle for neighbours and custom sawmilling timbers and lumber for himself, neighbours, and a network of customers who discovered him through word of mouth.

“Being here 40 years, I realized that stuff falls apart,” said Vohs. “So you need to buy lumber to fix it or you can cut your own lumber to fix it. Being that I already had a tractor to pull logs out of the bush, I already had a Bobcat to put logs on my sawmill, and a chainsaw — all I was missing was the sawmill.”

Vohs carefully harvests about 50 spruce and aspen trees annually, with each measuring at least 16 inches at the butt (and some up to 30 inches). Typically, he falls the trees and transports them to his band sawmill, which is set up in an enclosure that also serves as shelter to protect his sawn lumber.

He focuses on lumber dimensions not readily available from retail lumberyards and recently milled a load of 1×10-inch boards for a friend. He generally cuts nothing smaller than 1×6 and as large as 2×12, along with a fairly high volume of 2×6 and 2×8 for cattle fencing he uses both on his own farm and sells to others.

What Vohs discovered about the value of selling wood products instead of raw logs comes as no surprise to veteran Alberta woodlot owner, Pieter Van Der Schoot, past president of the Woodlot Association of Alberta and 1998 recipient of the Master Woodlot Stewardship Award.

Van Der Schoot owns a 218-hectare woodlot near Breton and said he has planted well over 100,000 trees on the property over the many decades that he has lived and managed it. The woodlot, which includes two small brooks and 20 kilometres of trails, has become a popular field tour destination for forestry reps, landowners, scientists, and government officials, as it has evolved into a highly biodiverse setting.

It takes a bit of work to ensure that planted trees are free to grow without too much competition, but a well-managed woodlot produces high-quality wood fibre that is healthier and grows faster than trees in a natural forest, he said.

“I’ve seen pine seedlings grow three feet in one year,” said Van Der Schoot.

However, marketing the wood has been a constant source of frustration, and to this point, the province’s forest industry has not been willing to pay more for the wood than it has cost him to own and manage the woodlot, he added.

Vohs’s band sawmill provides him with the option of producing either timbers or boards. Timbers are the easiest wood product to manufacture on his all-hydraulic, 28-horsepower, gas-fuelled, Wood-Mizer LT40 band sawmill equipped with a debarker, which he purchased for $30,000 about 12 years ago.

Waste wood is processed through a small wood chipper, with the material used in Vohs’s cattle operations while first-cut slabs are processed into firewood for his home and shop.

“Small sawmilling and wood value adding are good opportunities to diversify farm income and provide local employment while reducing risk for forest fire,” said provincial agroforestry specialist Toso Bozic. “We have over 3.6 million hectares of private forest in Alberta, and it currently provides between two million to three million tonnes of wood fibre to the forest industry.”

When queried by friends and neighbours about the wisdom of making this investment into a band sawmill, Vohs points out its cost was about the same as a round baler. Having spent a couple of decades raising cattle, he says he’d rather be sawing lumber than baling hay.

“I don’t have the pressure of harvest and haying weather anymore,” said Vohs. “The sawmill is really nice that way. If the unit breaks down, it’s not that bad because there is nothing spoiling on you right away. You can just fix the sawmill and carry on.”

Today, between running his sawmill, custom grazing cattle for other area farmers, and offering farm services to his neighbours, Vohs said, “I am plenty entertained every day.”

The post Timber is a winner for Caroline cattle producer appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Donna and Alex von Hauff, who operate Strathcona Ventures, have since expanded into a variety of health, dust control, and non-wood-related products for both horses and humans.

But spruce-pine-fir (SPF) wood shavings for animal bedding remains their main focus and their market extends well beyond horses to include a wide array of livestock — supplying horse stables throughout North America and Asia along with dairy, poultry, and cattle operations as well as the greenhouse and resource industries.

The von Hauffs’ leap from horse enthusiasts to suppliers to the equine industry is exactly what the province is hoping to encourage, said Toso Bozic, a bioenergy and forestry specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

“Alberta’s forest industry generates high volumes of waste products like wood shavings,” said Bozic. “We can help interested Albertans investigate the potential of these waste materials, and develop business plans around finding customers for them, just like what Strathcona Ventures has done.”

The von Hauffs have learned a lot since starting their business in 2010, with the most important lesson being that venturing into the wood shavings market is not for the faint of heart. The business, they say, is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface.

For example, their clients typically have very precise requirements, but the quality of wood shavings varies widely and ranges from sawdust size to material the size of a toonie.

“It’s sort of like wine,” said Alex von Hauff. “Some people like wine out of the box and some people won’t touch it unless it is $150 a bottle.”

That was a big part of the learning curve — recognizing that each sawmill generates a certain wood-shaving dimension depending on its planer, the size of lumber being manufactured, and the species of wood being processed. The von Hauffs source from several sawmills and they’ve become experts in knowing who can supply what and when.

“The wood shavings that they generate don’t have to be great, just consistent,” said von Hauff, adding he and his mother work through a shavings procurement broker who is very well acquainted with their needs.

Alberta is a good market because it can provide the volume that Strathcona Ventures needs but relationships with suppliers is the key to creating a successful animal-bedding business, he said.

Their broker conducts detailed interviews with prospective sawmill suppliers to determine the quality, quantity, and accessibility to the wood shavings, but the von Hauffs have to be constantly monitoring supply in a business that can easily become a logistical nightmare.

Although they would love to have long-term supply contracts, the nature of the sawmill business usually precludes that, said von Hauff. And the business of buying wood shavings can be “cutthroat” and organizing the transportation of bagged or bulk wood shavings is highly stressful, he said.

They provide primarily a bagged product because it stores well and produces much less waste than a bulk product, said Donna von Hauff.

The business is just one example of how agriculture can use waste products generated by Alberta’s wood industry, said Bozic, adding he’d be happy to talk to anyone who has any ideas for other opportunities. He can be reached at 780-415-2681 or toso.bozic@gov.ab.ca.

The post Alberta duo spots opportunity lying beneath their (horses’) feet appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The film is one of several westerns the sawmill has supplied among its highly eclectic client list.

“Pretty much every movie that has been filmed here that is a western, we’ve supplied most, if not all their timber,” said David Brooks who operates the enterprise with wife Marcie.

Lumber from the custom sawing operation has also helped build Cochrane and the surrounding area. Nestled in the picturesque foothills west of the town, the sawmill is now surrounded by million-dollar ranches and oil-money mansions. But chances are lumber for the corrals and outbuildings, the beautifully knotted and burled gateposts leading to the stately houses, and even wood for furniture were supplied by the operation.

While the area is highly prosperous now, the fictitious, hinterland backdrop shown in “The Revenant” movie was daily life for decades for the Brooks family. Now a mere half-hour drive from town, it was wagon trails and pioneer living in the early days. The property where the sawmill is located was purchased by Brooks’ great-grandfather Frank Brooks in 1901. The sawmill was established in 1923 and is likely the oldest, continuously family-owned, sawmill business in the province. It started with manual felling and horse logging.

“When my great-grandfather started the business, they were producing a lot of ties for the mines around Canmore and farther east,” said Brooks.

The way of doing business was different, too. The community only had one telephone (at a local general store), so customers would call the store and pre-order loads of lumber in fall. It would be sawn in winter and customers would show up in spring in their horse-drawn wagons. The Brooks provided a bunkhouse so that customers could rest up overnight before returning home the next day. This practice carried on for years.

“Grandpa would ride down every week to the store and pick up the papers of what he needed to saw, and he would just stockpile it all,” said Brooks.

His mother, MaryLou, described the road to Cochrane as a ‘goat trail.’ When she called to ask if a bus could be sent to the sawmill to take her children to school, the school office asked how she expected the school bus to get there. To solve the problem, she became the school bus driver.

In the 1930s, the family acquired a steam engine from an old Canmore coal mine.

“There was a drought in those days, so there was only enough water to saw for half a day,” recalled Brooks. “We’d run the engine ’til we ran out of water.”

It was later upgraded to a TD14 diesel engine, which powered the sawmill till 1990, when it was replaced with a Detroit diesel engine.

The Brooks Sawmill has supplied everything from timbers and lumber to authentic-looking hanging trees and biscuits (from the ends of logs) for wedding decorations.

The couple, who also has a small herd of 30 cattle, employs four people in the sawmill along with nine part-time employees in the firewood division, which supplies area campgrounds and hotels. The lumber side produces everything from eight-foot-long 1x4s to massive timbers as long as 32 feet and 14 inches square.

And when the phone rings these days, they never know what the customer will ask for.

“In addition to a lot of movie sets, we’ve shipped material, such as heavy timbers as far as Texas,” said Brooks.

The post Family sawmill a link to the pioneer days of Alberta appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“The fact is that if we don’t learn how to recycle nutrients and water, we are doomed,” said the senior research scientist at the Bio-industrial Opportunities Branch of Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

“We will start dying off from hunger. This is just one approach to prolong our existence on this planet.”

Savidov is part of a team using a device called a bioreactor to extract nutrients from waste streams like animal manure. Described as ‘liquid composting,’ the bioreactor uses micro-organisms in an oxygen-rich environment to mineralize and dissolve the nutrients in a liquid solution. The nutrients can then be reused as plant food.

Recycling nutrients is critical because synthetic fertilizer sources are non-renewable, said Savidov. For example, 85 per cent of all phosphorus rock reserves on the planet are located in just one region (Morocco and the Western Sahara) while nitrogen synthetic fertilizers can only be produced using fossil fuels.

And recycled nutrients have an added benefit.

A demonstration project by Savidov, engineer and system designer Marc Legault, and their colleagues used the aerobic bioreactor to capture nutrients from raw poultry manure. They then used the dissolved organic fertilizer — or digestate — to produce vegetables and tree seedlings in a soilless growing environment.

“The results exceeded all our expectations,” said Savidov. “We demonstrated that we can produce vigorous growth of major nursery crops grown in Alberta and B.C. using poultry manure digestate.”

For example, greenhouse tomatoes grown with digestate had a 15 per cent higher yield than plants given synthetic fertilizer.

The reason?

Recycled organic fertilizers are biologically active with beneficial micro-organisms and this results in enhanced nutrient uptake by plants, said Savidov.

All types of manure can be used in the system, but poultry manure was chosen because it’s readily available, rich in nitrogen, and less fibrous than cattle manure. The latter is important because the more fibre, the longer the fermentation process in the bioreactor.

And speed is one of the selling points of this system.

Conventional composting of manure typically takes months, but liquid composting requires just two to three weeks. The method results in 100 per cent conversion of the raw manure to liquid plant food.

As well, an aerobic bioreactor is not expensive, space-age technology — it’s just a septic tank with a built-in agitator. Intense mixing of the three ingredients within the tank — manure, oxygen, and water — is critical to maintain consistent fermentation. And unlike septic tanks there’s no odour because oxygen reacts with foul-smelling compounds such as hydrogen sulphide.

After about three weeks, the bioreactor is stopped and the processed liquid is removed to a filtration tank, where any remaining solids are separated from the liquid and returned to the bioreactor for further fermentation, while the liquid stream is ready for use. The resulting liquid fertilizer has a low sodium content and a pH level within the tolerable range for plants.

The fermentation process also generates heat, which can be captured and used to heat buildings on the farm.

“To be honest, it’s not really an absolutely new system,” said Savidov. “It’s using bits and pieces of what is already used in the agriculture industry for manure treatment.”

Similar systems are already in use in Europe, and the hope is that the Alberta project will help aerobic fermentation of animal manure catch on here, too, he said.

The post Alberta project turns manure into liquid gold appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Researchers have discovered a strain of naturally occurring micro-algae that can scrub 100 per cent of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and power plants before they enter the atmosphere.

And micro-algae grows by leaps and bounds when fed with poultry manure as an organic fertilizer.

“Chicken manure is high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — it contains the main nutrients that algae need,” said Bob Mroz, president and CEO of HY-TEK Bio.

The Maryland-based biotech company is developing and marketing patented technology using micro-algae for mitigation of greenhouse gases. Commercial application of the technology is definitely a new potential income stream for poultry farmers, said Mroz. Should the company establish a facility in Alberta, it would pay for the raw poultry manure needed in their process, he added.

Also, by establishing one of its manure conversion plants on a poultry farm — which liquefies and processes the raw manure so that it is nutrient ready for feeding micro-algae — farmers could have access to a new source of organic fertilizer, he said. Its technology can even remove phosphorus from the nutrient liquid stream, if that is an issue in the area where the farm is located, he said.

HY-TEK Bio’s technology has caught the eye of the provincial government, which recently awarded it a $500,000 grant. The grant is part of a three-stage, $35-million international Grand Challenge: Innovative Carbon Uses competition offered by the province’s Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation. The corporation collects a levy from large greenhouse gas emitters and uses the money to fund promising technology aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

HY-TEK Bio will definitely be applying for more funding during the second phase of the CCEMC Grand Challenge, which opens in September, said Mroz.

How it works

Micro-algae are photosynthetic, plant-like organisms that need light, water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus. They can feed on compounds such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and sulphur dioxide as well as volatile organic compounds commonly emitted from such facilities as heavy oil production plants and coal-fired power plants. They release oxygen in the process and grow into a plant commodity with considerable commercial potential.

The challenge for HY-TEK Bio was to find an inexpensive source of nutrients to fertilize the micro-algae to accelerate its growth so it can perform as advertised in a greenhouse gas mitigation application. And since there are many poultry farms in Maryland, the company turned to that potential source.

What got company officials interested in using poultry manure as algae food was a chance encounter with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said Mroz. The bay suffers from considerable algae growth, and the foundation was concerned that poultry manure from egg and poultry producers was finding its way into the bay.

HY-TEK Bio then approached researchers at the University of Maryland — who have been working with micro-algae extensively for the past five years — to investigate poultry manure’s potential as a cheap nutrient source. The company already has a working demonstration facility with four bioreactors consuming flue gas emissions from a three-megawatt, biogas-fuelled power plant attached to a City of Baltimore waste water treatment plant.

Alberta bound?

HY-TEK Bio is looking for commercial partners to help demonstrate its technology in Alberta, and is currently in talks with the City of Calgary about the possibility of installing its technology as part of the municipal waste treatment system.

Using poultry manure as fertilizer for micro-algae would direct that manure into a new, non-polluting direction, said Feng Chen, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Centre for Environmental Science

The university’s research, with support from HY-TEK Bio, has devised a method to liquefy raw poultry manure and create an end product that is clear enough so that it does not impede the growth of the micro-algae, which Mroz says is a significant recent breakthrough.

University of Maryland researchers say that they are “quite encouraged” by the results they have witnessed so far in using poultry manure nutrients to encourage micro-algae growth.

The post Call it a win-win: Curbing pollution with chicken manure appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

It’s a major step for the company, which was created to find a way to use manure from Highland Feeders as a biogas feedstock.

“It’s part of our strategy to protect the core intellectual property that makes our system work better than anybody else’s,” said Trevor Nickel, Himark’s general manager. “We’ve been very careful to try to broadly protect our patents as much as possible.”

Himark has refined and commercialized technology initially developed by a consortium of feedlots and the Alberta Research Council. In addition to a biogas and ethanol production facility located next to the feedlot at Hairy Hill, its technology is also in use at one of the world’s largest biogas plants in Oakley, Kansas.

Turning feedlot manure into biogas is a tricky process because it is laden with sand and other solids. The two patents are for technology that addresses those issues — one is for a High Solids Infeed System (HiSIS) for handling and processing mixed waste, and the other for a Clean Slate anaerobic tank grit removal system.

Patenting the technology means the company can now more openly show potential customers “how our system ticks,” said Nickel.

Potential customers will be able to independently assess the engineering of the system, which will give them the confidence that the system works as advertised. That, in turn, will also make it easier for clients to get financing.

Himark is targeting customers south of the border, added Nickel.

“We have had very good success marketing our technology into the United States,” he said. “There is a high demand for it, and there are a number of programs that have made anaerobic digestion uptake faster and easier in the States.”

Biogas is used to generate electricity and Himark is currently building three projects in the one-half- to one-megawatt range for NEO Energy in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In this case, it is using food waste and agricultural byproducts as the raw material, converting it to biogas and organic fertilizer byproducts. (The Hairy Hill facility also now runs largely on organic waste from Edmonton and surrounding municipalities.)

But Himark also has a number of projects on the front burner to use feedlot manure as the main feedstock, said Nickel.

“We’re definitely the world leader in dealing with open-pen feedlot manure,” he said.

When Himark first started refining the technology about 10 years ago, it discovered many biogas production challenges and in some cases, anaerobic digester failures, when feeding feedlot manure into digester tanks. The HiSIS system removes solid and indigestible material such as sand, rocks, plastic and metal which can interfere with mechanical, chemical, and biological processes in the anaerobic digester.

The Clean Slate technology takes the matter of handling solids a step further. It removes indigestible solids and inorganic foreign objects which settle on the tank floor during the production of methane-rich biogas. This allows continuous production without the expensive and inconvenient need to shut down the anaerobic digestion tanks and clean them out.

In addition to the U.S., Himark has identified several high-priority markets for its technology, said Nickel, adding it looks for growing economies where there are poorly developed waste management systems.

The post Patents boost Alberta biogas company’s plans for expansion appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The result is a ‘superfertilizer’ that area farmers can’t get enough of. The phone at the Whitecourt plant rings off the hook from farmers asking about the availability of the organic fertilizer, and some have even stopped the trucking contractor delivering the sludge to ask how they can get some.

And there’s no mystery about why.

One project at a site near Mayerthorpe showed a one-time sludge application at 50 tonnes per hec-tare yielded the same quality and quantity of barley as application of 200 kilograms per hectare of 35-10-0 fertilizer applied annually for three years.

And given the pulp sludge is free, it’s no wonder farmers stop delivery trucks.

Whitecourt-area farmer, Chad Merrifield is a longtime user of the product.

“With our program, I would say that our nitrogen savings are probably sitting around 60 per cent,” said Merrifield. “That will be reduced somewhat because it has to be incorporated.”

Merrifield plants about 650 hectares into canola and wheat — some located close to the Millar Western Forest Products mechanical pulp plant. He’s been applying mechanical pulp sludge from both Millar Western and Alberta Newsprint Company since the mid-1990s.

The material is applied with spreader trucks, and is provided at no charge by both companies within a 45-kilometre radius of their plants. (Diverting the sludge has saved Alberta Newsprint Company the expense of building two landfills.)

Millar Western both delivers and applies the pulp sludge, with incorporation handled by Merrifield. Along with lower fertilizer costs, he gets a bonus of higher-quality soil.

“We have found that there are a lot more earthworms in the soil because it is a lot softer and more pliable,” he said. “It doesn’t bake at all and holds water appropriately because it (pulp sludge) is adding the fibre back in.”

Years of research

The sludge, a byproduct of the mechanical pulping process, has been described as a porridge-like material. It’s about 80 per cent water, but also contains short lignin fibres, is high in carbon, and contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. And unlike kraft pulping, it doesn’t contain high concentrations of harmful chemicals.

After tomatoes were spotted growing in the pulp sludge more than two decades ago, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF, formerly the Alberta Research Council) began conducting studies. The evidence concerning the sludge’s potential as organic fertilizer got better and better as scientists progressed from lab work to field trials to actual full-scale land application. Along the way, the Mechanical Pulp and Paper Consortium was also formed to help finance and guide the research.

Among the findings was that because the nitrogen is in organic form, the sludge acts as a slow-release fertilizer and delivers nutrient benefits for up to five years. It also improves soil structure and tilth, thereby increasing water-holding capacity.

Its chemical composition is about 45 per cent carbon, between 1.5 and 3.0 per cent nitrogen, and 0.3 per cent to 0.5 per cent phosphorus, said Dani Degenhardt, an AITF researcher.

Merrifield took part in some of the early studies to establish an optimum range of tonnes per hectare to achieve the best production results — which was found to be between 50 to 100 dry tonnes per hectare per application.

Application is ‘quite manageable’ as it is thinly applied and can be incorporated immediately to avoid any odour issues with neighbours. Merrifield applies it post-harvest every six to eight years, and said he’s seen benefits last for up to 12 years.

Test results

The pulp sludge had greatly improved his soil, he said. Just in fibre content alone, many Prairie soils register at between three and five per cent. On Merrifield’s land where the pulp sludge has been applied, it’s between 15 to 18 per cent.

In another Alberta Innovates study, application of 50 tonnes per hectare increased brome grass productivity by fivefold compared to control plots, and this increased yield was sustained for six growing seasons. The study used Magna smooth brome grass, and researchers calculated the volume increase by cutting hay on both a control site and a pulp sludge application site.

“The (test) site was a coarse-textured site and the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio before application of sludge was around 16 to 21,” said Degenhardt. “It increased to 33 to 38 post-application.”

Merrifield has also applied and incorporated pulp sludge on hay ground prior to seeding.

“You have a slow-release nitrogen for a number of years,” he said. “So it reduces the need for supplemental fertilizer.”

Another key factor is that it has neutral pH.

Although the material is a biological form of fertilizer, it’s not certified organic.

“Unfortunately, because the sludge is an organic waste product from an industrial process, it would be very challenging to get the status changed so that the organic producers could still use it,” said Degenhardt. “We’ve tried in the past and were not successful.”

One obvious concern is the impact of less desirable elements in the sludge. Degenhardt said at the time of application, there is a slight increase in electrical conductivity, sodium absorption ratio, nitrate, nitrite, and metals such as copper, nickel and zinc, but they are not long lasting. Merrifield’s only concern was with the hydrogen peroxide content, but once incorporated, it breaks down to hydrogen and oxygen.

The post Sludge a success story for Whitecourt-area farmers appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.