Surrey County Test Site
Awards and Letters
Re: Including Animal Mortalities with Compostable Materials
One the best ways to offset climate change is to Compost things in the living carbon chain
| The management of animal mortalities is an important aspect of livestock farming since even the best livestock farmers lose some of their animals each year. Rendering, burial, and incineration have been the typical carcass disposal methods. However, these options are becoming less practical for many farmers because of decreasing availability and higher costs of rendering, biosecurity concerns, and potential adverse effects on groundwater and air quality. For these reasons, composting is becoming more widely used as a method of mortality disposal. Composting is a naturally occurring process in which bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms convert organic material into a stabilized product termed compost. This means that microorganisms do the composting work for you. Agricultural and livestock pollution are becoming an increasingly significant source of contamination for rivers, groundwater and oceans all over the globe. A properly managed mortality and waste composting system is low cost, environmentally sound, biosecure, and virtually odor free. Problems such as the specific needs of a North Carolina pig farmer’s waste lagoons are met and answered by the simple system of the Bio-E™. Mr. Carter’s hog farm test site operation proved the process capable of handling hog mortality and waste. All tests conducted at the Surrey County site passed and surpassed EPA regulation by running at a temperature of 148F, a considerable distance from the required minimum of 131F. By not requiring specialized machinery the system creates a clear possibility of an immediate solution for livestock feedlot and fertilizer runoff. Scalable from a 200 to 10,000 plus animal farm, the Bio-E™ could provide a simple solution to many of our largest and most pressing ecological concerns. |