The Farm Manure to Energy Initiative: Using Excess Manure to Generate Farm Income in the Chesapeake's Phosphorus Hotspots.

Currently, all the Chesapeake Bay states are working to achieve nutrient reduction goals from various pollution sources, including significant reductions in phosphorus pollution from agriculture, particularly with respect to phosphorus losses from land application of manure.   In order to meet nutrient reduction goals, producers in high-density animal agricultural production areas such as Lancaster County region of Pennsylvania, the Delmarva Peninsula, and the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia, need viable alternatives to local land application of untreated animal manures.

The Farm Manure to Energy Initiative is a collaborative effort to expand manure management alternatives in the Bay watershed’s concentrated animal production regions.  With a primary goal of moving excess nutrients from animal production hotspots, the project team focused on farm-scale technologies with the most promising potential to provide alternatives to local land application while generating new revenue streams from the excess manure nutrients.  Through a comprehensive review process the team vetted several technologies for energy capture from both liquid and dry manures and identified thermochemical conversion technologies as a viable pathway to nutrient reduction using poultry litter as the fuel source. These poultry litter to energy technologies were commercially emerging options ready for on-farm demonstration and evaluation.  Although energy capture to produce electricity was one desired outcome, the currently available systems all capture energy in the form of heat for the poultry production houses.  Heating derived from using poultry litter as the fuel source reduces the farm’s propane use while creating a dryer environment that benefits flock performance.  Manure nutrients through the conversion process are concentrated in a nutrient-dense ash or biochar co-product that may be cost-effectively transported long distances and used to replace inorganic fertilizer in crop production systems or custom fertilizer blends.    

Field demonstrations of these innovative manure to energy technologies are being implemented on up to five Chesapeake Bay region poultry farms.  Demonstrations are monitored to determine whether the technologies are environmentally beneficial, and economically and technically feasible. Specific measures of performance include: reliability and heat distribution, in-house air quality, avoided propane or electricity use, and costs to install and maintain the systems.  The Farm Manure to Energy Initiative is also supporting efforts to develop markets for the nutrient rich ash and biochar co-products.  Researchers at the Virginia Tech Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Experiment Station are conducting field trials using the nutrient rich ash and biochar resulting from the thermochemical conversion of poultry litter for fresh market vegetable and grain production.  In addition to assessing fertilizer value, they are working on material handling issues and market development for this co-product.  Project partners have also completed a survey of financing options for farm-scale technology deployment and published a comprehensive financing resources guide for farmers in the Chesapeake Bay region.  

To help growers determine whether this manure to energy approach makes sense for their farm, the project team will be providing rigorous evaluations of these systems’ environmental and economic performance, building regional technical expertise and posting lessons learned on a clearinghouse website developed in partnership with eXtension, www.extension.org/pages/68455.

Acknowledgements: Funding for this project is provided by a grant from the USDA Conservation Innovation Grant program, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation via the U.S. EPA Innovative Nutrient and Sediment Reduction Program, the Chesapeake Bay Funders Network, as well as technology vendors and host farmers participating in the technology demonstrations.