Processing manure or combining it with other materials to create a more sustainable or valuable product is a fairly new concept, and researchers are looking at how novel manure products can reduce environmental impact while improving a farm’s bottom line.
Since 2021, UW-Platteville has been a part of a national project on regenerative agriculture. The six-state research initiative is the Dairy Soil & Water Regeneration project.
Professor Dennis Busch is working on this eight-year project. He says there are a lot of moving parts across the six states as they study novel manure products. Research takes into account feed production, soil health, manure management, greenhouse gases, and forage yield, for example. UW-Platteville has a unique focus as well — water quality.
Busch says the percentage of adoption of these manure-based technologies on farms is very small, maybe a fraction of a percent, because it’s still in the development phase. The reason for doing this work is to see how the technology fits into farming systems and potentially help these novel manure products move from a pilot phase to a commercial phase.
“I think the biggest unknown is how these new manure-based technologies fit into dairy production systems. These are systems that are at the pilot phase of development,” Busch explains. “We aren’t creating this product here… we get it from a commercial dairy operation in Wisconsin where they have this system installed. The intent of the system is to be able to concentrate nutrients, more consistent product, that might have less of an environmental impact when we use it in the field.”
He says he sees the research data being important when it comes to the transfer of nutrients. He says as farms get bigger — more animals, more manure — it gets more difficult to redistribute the nutrients to the field.
“If we can take the liquid dairy manure, process it, and create a product that’s more consistent, that’s more concentrated, that’s more able to be utilized more as a fertilzier and less as a manure in practice, I think that would really help with getting the nutrients spread back out on the landscape,” he says. “I think it could be a big factor for the dairies… manure management invariably is one of the highest-ranking issues that they deal with. If these new technologies are able to assist producers with that management of the manure and nutrients, I think that would be a big benefit to the industry.”
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