Soil scientist
Peter Kleinman will investigate an experimental method of injecting chicken
litter into soil to keep this natural fertilizer from running into the
Chesapeake Bay. Click the image for more information about
it. |
Testing Poultry Litter for No-Till Farming
By Jan
Suszkiw November 20, 2006
Peter
Kleinman plans to take his research on the road this fall. Every month or
so, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) soil scientist will leave the rolling
valleys of Pennsylvania dairy country for corn, crabs and
chickenhallmarks of the Delmarva Peninsula.
The 5,950-square-mile peninsula encompasses parts of Delaware,
Maryland and Virginia. There, Kleinman will investigate an experimental method
of injecting chicken litter into the soil to keep this natural fertilizer from
running off into the Chesapeake Bay.
Each year, Delmarva's 2,700 or so poultry farms raise about
571,141,000 chickens. The 600,000 tons of litter they producea mixture of
manure and bedding strawis an ideal fertilizer for corn, soybeans and
other Delmarva crops. However, spreading it over the soil surface exposes
nutrients like phosphorus to runoff that can drain into the bay's surrounding
waters, triggering algal blooms that block sunlight and deprive fish, crabs and
other forms of aquatic life of oxygen.
The increasingly popular use of no-till farming compounds the problem,
according to Kleinman, with the ARS
Pasture
Systems and Watershed Management Research Laboratory, University Park, Pa.
Since 2005, he has been researching fertilizer-application equipment
called injectors, which squirt liquefied manure below the soil surface.
Tom
Way, a collaborator with the ARS
Soil
Dynamics Laboratory in Auburn, Ala., developed the new litter-injector
technology. Now, in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire's Cooperative
Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology (CICEET) and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, they're exploring equipment modifications that could enable
the injection of chicken litter into the Delmarva Peninsulas sandy soils.
Their on-site efforts will draw from prior research in which Kleinman
and colleagues from ARS, The Pennsylvania State
University and the University of
Maryland-Eastern Shore used a combination of rainfall simulators, runoff
monitoring technology and other equipment to examine how well four types of
cow-manure injectors curbed runoff and odors emanating from fertilized fields.
The project is one of 15 that CICEET is funding nationwide to foster new
approaches to safeguarding America's coastal regions.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.