Combing manure treatment and sustainable farming as integrated circular agriculture system

Combing manure treatment and sustainable farming as integrated circular agriculture system

Combing manure treatment and sustainable farming as integrated circular agriculture system

Taiwan’s hog farms faced problems with manure treatment. Because of the conventional and old waste treatment facilities were built from decades ago, it’s difficult and costly to reconstruct one to meet modern needs. Additionally, there is a tide of combining biogas generation with pastoral wastewater purification recently; however, for a small-scale hog farm, biogas generation solutions could cost them 20 million dollars, which is nearly impossible to afford it.
My team, Agriforward, a social enterprise providing sustainable and circular agriculture solutions with technologies and social innovation, we propose a new circular solution concept called “5Rs”: Redesign, Reduce, Recycle, Recovery, and Resilience, assists clients with implementing these concepts to tackle their issues.
Instead of facility reconstruction, we redesign the whole process of manure treatment and link it with environmental purpose farms, which could both purify disposed water and benefit to improve farm fertility. The total solution contains special microorganism called photo-synthetic bacteria (PSB) recycled from disposed water which could effectively reduce the concentration of ammonia nitrogen of water, and also a pump with IoT-based valve-controller that could remotely control and maintain functions of pumps and provide proper growing conditions for PSB cultivation in disposed water in an energy-saving way. After applying our circular solution, the hog farm eventually meets government’s standard of drain water.

Microorganism like PSB owns lots of benefits. First of all, it could be recycled and scaled up quantity from hog’s disposed water and reduce the concentration of ammonia nitrogen of water when PSB is added to specific concentration. Secondly, PSB could benefits sustainable farming for promoting plants’ nutrition absorption ability and lower the abundance of pests and weeds while production. Moreover, PSB could also help plants recover from overdose fertilized and improper pest control treatments. As a result, we not only introduce PSB to tackle hog manure treatment issue, but also extend the application to eco-friendly-pursued farming management. We have successfully used PSB on pomelo orchard that used to overdose pesticide and herbicide to achieve a high-quality production without chemical usage.

According to our solution, we redesign conventional hog manure treatment process; recycle good materials from disposed water; make use of recycled PSB to reduce ammonia nitrogen of disposed water and herbicide or pesticide usage of pomelo farming management; help pomelo orchard recover from improper pest control; and finally letting hog farm and pomelo orchard reach a comparatively resilience environmental condition.

Agriforward is a social enterprise providing sustainable and circular agriculture solutions with technologies and social innovation. For solving client’s problems, we start from on-site observation and user interviews and try to figure out core insights of the problem to bring out a systematic solution. Since founded the company, we have completed several circular agriculture projects from hog manure treatment to help eco-friendly-purposed farmers with non-pesticide and non-herbicide management, and we find that the key to our solutions is the concept of “Redesign”. Once tackling problems as a “design issue”, we can see problems in different way, and provide a more customized and long-term solution for clients.

Take the small-scale hog manure treatment project as an example. Our client, a hog farmer who faces problem with waste-water treatment, has an urgent need in meeting government’s policy of drain water standard, but he cannot afford such a fortune to reconstruct a new treatment facility or build up a biogas generation plant, which many consulting companies advise him to do so. After fully understand his problem, we think that “waste treatment process” should be redesign. In this case, the main problem relates to an easily broken pump that leads to accumulation of suspended solid materials. As a result, we focus on redesigning pumping process and provide an IoT-based valve-controller that could remotely control and maintain pumping functions. Meanwhile, we also find out there is a special microorganism called photo-synthetic bacteria (PSB) existing in disposed water that could actually help reduce concentration of ammonia nitrogen from water, only if there is enough amount of PSB in water. Therefore, we combine IoT-based valve-controller with recycled PSB addition as our solution, and also make the smart controller can optimize the growing condition of PSB. The proposed circular solution eventually let the disposed water meet drain water standard.

While we tackling hog farmer’s problem, we also serve another pomelo farmer with eco-friendly-purposed pomelo production problems. After the pomelo farmer inherited his pomelo orchard, he found out it was overdose fertilized and treated with improper pest control methods. As pomelo is one of a fruit that easily attract insects and growing weeds, it’s challenging for farmers to produce such fruit without pesticide and herbicide. Luckily, according to literature studies and previous application experience, we think PSB might help because it could promote plant nutrition absorption, so that farmers could reduce or even refuse herbicide and pesticide usage. Moreover, PSB could help plants recover from overdose fertilized, and reach to a healthier and nutrition balance status. The result is quite good, the pomelo farmer not only grows pomelo without chemicals, but also harvest more amount than his expectation with high-quality appearance and taste. The pomelo production project is also embedded with redesign concept, with comprehensive understand of history of pomelo orchard, PSB, and farmer’s farming habits, a new pomelo production process could come to earth.

Along with “Redesign”, we also proposed other concepts to build a circular model, which involve ”Recycle”, “Reduce”, “Recovery”, and “Resilience”. From the hog manure treatment project, we meet concept of “Recycle” for recycled PSB addition. And in pomelo project, we help farmer reduce chemical usage, recover pomelo orchard ecology, and eventually promote the pomelo orchard to environmental resilience. With “Redesign” concept, hog manure treatment and pomelo production could be seemed as part of circular economic system, so the systematic problem could be solved with sharing material or resource integration, which can also lead to a greater cost-beneficial result.