"A" for Amazing
Deodorant For The Farms
If this doesn’t make you smile, you might want to check to make sure your face muscles still work: Imagine cleaning up smelly, polluting poultry manure and hog and dairy waste... with a giant stick of underarm deodorant!
Before you all write in to tell me that I’ve obviously been standing too close to the hog barn fumes for too long, let me explain. Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have found that aluminum chloride — a common ingredient in deodorant sticks — can go a long way toward minimizing those “lovely” vapors that tend to concentrate around swine and dairy production facilities, and can even help slash ammonia levels in big chicken houses (the kind with 50,000 birds under one roof).
This is a story with a long history. Back in 1992, an ARS scientist in northwest Arkansas (that’s “chicken country,” folks) discovered that if you add alum—also known as aluminum sulfate—to poultry litter before you pile the litter onto farm fields as cheap fertilizer, the alum greatly reduces the chances that the phosphorus in that litter will run off into nearby streams, lakes and rivers.
How does this work? It seems that when alum meets phosphate, the two lock themselves in a loving embrace, forming aluminum phosphate, which is much less prone to run off.
Just on general principles, keeping excess phosphorus out of our waterways sounds like a good idea. But the specifics are even more compelling: When phosphorus hits the water, it can increase populations of blue-green algae and undesirable aquatic plants that suck the oxygen right out of the water, leading to fish kills as well as odor and taste problems in municipal water supplies.
About the same time as his discovery of the impact of alum on phosphorus runoff, the ARS scientist found that alum could also reduce ammonia emissions in poultry houses. That was great news, because the ammonia vapors from poultry litter could get so bad that they’d actually burn holes in the birds’ throats and lungs. Also, that terrible air quality was none too good for the people who had to work in the poultry houses.
(In case you’re wondering where the ammonia comes from: Poultry manure contains not only phosphorus, but also nitrogen. And when the nitrogen sits around long enough, it starts to turn into a gas — ammonia — as the result of a natural process called “volatilizing.”)
Alum’s many charms led to a patented alum-based treatment for poultry litter in 1997, and the treatment was licensed and commercially marketed the following year. Today some 700 million U.S. chickens are raised each year with the alum treatment.
More recently, the ARS scientist has discovered an even better aluminum performer for treating the liquid manure associated with pig farms and dairy cow operations: aluminum chloride. When you add aluminum chloride to liquid manure, you don’t get any smelly gases, and the aluminum chloride performs like a champ at reducing atmospheric ammonia levels in big animal rearing facilities. It even helps with the energy bills at the big barns and chicken houses, because less ventilation is needed!
For the past 10 years (the first half of a 20-year study), the ARS scientist and his colleagues have been looking at the long-term benefits of putting alum-treated litter on the land. They’re studying paired one-acre watersheds in a commercial beef and broiler chicken operation, plus 52 small plots on university land. They’re comparing nutrient runoff after applications of alum-treated poultry litter, untreated poultry litter and ammonium nitrate (the most common commercial nitrogen fertilizer). They’re monitoring runoff volume and taking samples after each rain.
So how do things look after the first decade? The news is even better than expected: Applying alum-treated litter to the land, rather than untreated litter, has reduced phosphorus runoff by 75 percent at the watershed scale and as much as 87 percent from the small plots. Other studies have shown that alum-treated litter can reduce runoff of heavy metals such as arsenic, copper and zinc by as much as 50 percent, and of naturally occurring estrogen by 42 percent.
Perhaps that first “a” in alum and aluminum chloride is short for “amazing!”
"Everybody's
Science" is written by Sandy Miller Hays, Director of Information for
the Agricultural Research Service, the chief scientific research agency
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hays is a native of Fort Smith,
Ark. From the late 1970s until early 1988, Hays was a reporter, editor
and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat (now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette),
a Little Rock-based daily newspaper. She joined the ARS Information
Staff in 1988, and became Director of Information in April 1998.
Deodorant For The Farms
If this doesn’t make you smile, you might want to check to make sure your face muscles still work: Imagine cleaning up smelly, polluting poultry manure and hog and dairy waste... with a giant stick of underarm deodorant!
Before you all write in to tell me that I’ve obviously been standing too close to the hog barn fumes for too long, let me explain. Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have found that aluminum chloride — a common ingredient in deodorant sticks — can go a long way toward minimizing those “lovely” vapors that tend to concentrate around swine and dairy production facilities, and can even help slash ammonia levels in big chicken houses (the kind with 50,000 birds under one roof).
This is a story with a long history. Back in 1992, an ARS scientist in northwest Arkansas (that’s “chicken country,” folks) discovered that if you add alum—also known as aluminum sulfate—to poultry litter before you pile the litter onto farm fields as cheap fertilizer, the alum greatly reduces the chances that the phosphorus in that litter will run off into nearby streams, lakes and rivers.
Technician Scott Becton (left) and soil scientist Philip Moore collect
runoff water samples from a long-term paired watershed study being
conducted in northwest Arkansas to measure phosphorus runoff from
alum-treated poultry litter. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus)
How does this work? It seems that when alum meets phosphate, the two lock themselves in a loving embrace, forming aluminum phosphate, which is much less prone to run off.
Just on general principles, keeping excess phosphorus out of our waterways sounds like a good idea. But the specifics are even more compelling: When phosphorus hits the water, it can increase populations of blue-green algae and undesirable aquatic plants that suck the oxygen right out of the water, leading to fish kills as well as odor and taste problems in municipal water supplies.
About the same time as his discovery of the impact of alum on phosphorus runoff, the ARS scientist found that alum could also reduce ammonia emissions in poultry houses. That was great news, because the ammonia vapors from poultry litter could get so bad that they’d actually burn holes in the birds’ throats and lungs. Also, that terrible air quality was none too good for the people who had to work in the poultry houses.
(In case you’re wondering where the ammonia comes from: Poultry manure contains not only phosphorus, but also nitrogen. And when the nitrogen sits around long enough, it starts to turn into a gas — ammonia — as the result of a natural process called “volatilizing.”)
Alum’s many charms led to a patented alum-based treatment for poultry litter in 1997, and the treatment was licensed and commercially marketed the following year. Today some 700 million U.S. chickens are raised each year with the alum treatment.
More recently, the ARS scientist has discovered an even better aluminum performer for treating the liquid manure associated with pig farms and dairy cow operations: aluminum chloride. When you add aluminum chloride to liquid manure, you don’t get any smelly gases, and the aluminum chloride performs like a champ at reducing atmospheric ammonia levels in big animal rearing facilities. It even helps with the energy bills at the big barns and chicken houses, because less ventilation is needed!
For the past 10 years (the first half of a 20-year study), the ARS scientist and his colleagues have been looking at the long-term benefits of putting alum-treated litter on the land. They’re studying paired one-acre watersheds in a commercial beef and broiler chicken operation, plus 52 small plots on university land. They’re comparing nutrient runoff after applications of alum-treated poultry litter, untreated poultry litter and ammonium nitrate (the most common commercial nitrogen fertilizer). They’re monitoring runoff volume and taking samples after each rain.
So how do things look after the first decade? The news is even better than expected: Applying alum-treated litter to the land, rather than untreated litter, has reduced phosphorus runoff by 75 percent at the watershed scale and as much as 87 percent from the small plots. Other studies have shown that alum-treated litter can reduce runoff of heavy metals such as arsenic, copper and zinc by as much as 50 percent, and of naturally occurring estrogen by 42 percent.
Perhaps that first “a” in alum and aluminum chloride is short for “amazing!”
The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in-house scientific
research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You can read
more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news/.
About the author
"Everybody's
Science" is written by Sandy Miller Hays, Director of Information for
the Agricultural Research Service, the chief scientific research agency
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hays is a native of Fort Smith,
Ark. From the late 1970s until early 1988, Hays was a reporter, editor
and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat (now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette),
a Little Rock-based daily newspaper. She joined the ARS Information
Staff in 1988, and became Director of Information in April 1998.