Can composting clean up the Chesapeake Bay?

Partners launch farm-based enterprise to recycle manure for local markets.

By Greg Bowman
(Posted May 24, 2010)

An outside bedding and manure hauling business operates this on-farm composting operation on a 620-cow Lancaster County dairy farm. The white hoops are 60 by 400-foot fabric structures which block rainfall and provide good quality control for the composted soil amendment products sold to for horticultural use, mostly to landscapers and the “green industry.”

The Chesapeake Bay-friendly promoters of Oregon Dairy Organics are investing $1.5 million in the belief that manure composting--under excellent management and with successful marketing of a high-quality landscape product—is not only practical, but also could be profitable.

Composting is a tough sell for non-organic farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
http://md.water.usgs.gov/publications/fs-150-99/html/index.htm (USDA regulations strongly favor composting manure for use on certified-organic crop fields.) Livestock farmers feel they are already too busy to take on the logistics and labor of mixing manure with carbon-rich materials.

Oregon Valley Organics (ODO) of Lititz in north-central Lancaster County is a new business set to begin marketing a high-quality composted soil amendment product in the region by this summer. Environmental groups concerned about the Bay and looking for practical ways to help farmers cut nutrient losses helped to fund the project. They wanted someone in the region who had a proven record of managing a well-run, on-farm composting operation.  They approached Loren Martin, who has been fine-tuning such a project for six years in the southern part of livestock-dense Lancaster County.

The right mix

Martin is general manager of Terra-Gro, which he runs out of an office in Terre Hille in northern Lancaster County. The firm leases a composting site at Graywood Farms--a 620-cow dairy near Peach Bottom. Pine View Trucking, a sister company to Terra-Gro, is a certified manure hauler and broker, and specializes in supplying livestock bedding and removing manure as a farm service.

Pine View trucks supply the necessary bulking (high-carbon) materials to mix with the farm’s cow manure to achieve proper carbon-nitrogen-moisture ratios for efficient composting. Martin explained that Terra-Gro receives all of Graywood’s mechanically separated manure solids (a fibrous, stackable material), and uses more than 750,000 gallons of liquid manure from the farm annually. The liquid is piped directly from a storage lagoon into the Terra-Gro’s compost turner for injection into the compost windrow.

As the technical partner of Oregon Dairy Organics, Terra-Gro managers will apply everything they’ve learned from the Graywood Farms experience, Martin said, to test how well the model can be replicated as a sustainable agricultural enterprise. ODO will initially use only dairy manure from the multi-enterprise Oregon Dairy. The composting will be done on a fully approved 5-acre site at the farm, which is well known for its conservation efforts.

Oregon Dairy is home to about 500 cows and 450 heifers, with enterprises including a grocery store, ice cream parlor, restaurant, and lawn and garden center. The farm has been recognized numerous times for its efforts to protect water quality and other natural resources.

Near-by contributors

As management and marketing allow, the operation will receive scrape (solid) manure and poultry litter from farms restricted to a 15-mile radius, and yard waste (grass clippings, leaves, wood chips) from local municipalities and townships. The limited receiving area will reduce hauling costs and road wear for farmers, while government units will be able to divert the yard waste from landfills.

Target annual capacity is to handle about 18,000 tons of manure mixed with some 5,000 tons of yard waste per year to generate an estimated 16,000 cubic yards of finished compost. The end product would be a soil amendment targeted to the ornamental and vegetable horticulture, golf courses, athletic fields and landscapers, all within the region around the composting site.

Suzy Friedman of the conservation group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is directing the project. Friedman is deputy director of the EDF’s Center for Conservation Incentives. She said the ODO project goal is to “demonstrate that composting can offer a highly cost-effective and sustainable strategy to reduce nutrient pollution to the Bay by overcoming key obstacles to more widespread use of this technology.”

Screening mature compost creates a high-quality soil amendment derived from manure and other materials composted the Graywood dairy site in Peach Bottom, Lancaster County. Photos courtesy Terra-Gro

Attacking the barriers

She’s leading the charge to tackle these three barriers to greater composting by Chesapeake Bay farmers:

1. Overhead. Large-scale, regional composting facilities require significant planning and resources to collect, transport, and market the volumes of feedstocks and final product.
2. Opposition. Manure treatment projects can generate citizen opposition if community members do not understand the benefits of the project; fear the project will result in odors, flies, or negative environmental impacts; or do not believe there will be direct benefit to the community at large. 
3. On-farm challenges. Farmers who try to compost manure on-farm themselves often run into problems with flies or odors, logistics, and a final product that does not sell because they lack expertise to manage their compost operations effectively and fail to implement marketing efforts to meet the needs and expectations of their customers.

Agreeing with Friedman is Robert Keller, operator of Penn Valley Farms of Lititz, a diversified, certified organic crop, livestock and compost farm. He’s been improving and revising his approach to on-farm composting since the early 1990s. Keller uses dry manure and poultry litter from his own certified organic farm. Composting for most of the new livestock confinement operations built in the past 20 years would be much more difficult, however.

“Farmers were encouraged to ‘go liquid’ in recent decades, so they built liquid facilities and handling equipment,” Keller notes. “Those who’ve gone liquid are the least likely to think about composting. There would have to be significant incentives.”

Compost matters

That’s the hope of the conservation groups helping to bankroll the $1.5 million project, including Chesapeake Bay Funders Network, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

If Oregon Dairy Organics works well enough to be replicated, carefully-designed on-farm composting has a more promising future in the livestock-rich areas within Chesapeake Basin.

Greg Bowman is communications manager at the Rodale Institute.