Manure and Slurry Treatment

Understanding faecal matter: The key to realizing all the financial and environmental benefits of adding Plocher^® products to animal excrement and organic wastes

In nature when animals excrete or a tree branch falls, a natural process of material recovery takes place: A multitude of beneficial micro-organisms present in the environment jump on the precious matter and start recycling it. That transformation process gives back to the soil the nutrients needed for the next plants to grow. This phenomenon is called decomposition or composting. It’s a wonderful and efficient system!

These beneficial organisms in the soil are of the aerobic category, which means that they need an environment with oxygen to thrive and do their important work. When excrement and organic wastes pile up or are flooded with water where there is little to no oxygen, these beneficial micro-organisms either die or cannot reproduce and work. In come the anaerobic micro-organisms (those which live without oxygen). Unfortunately, they are usually pathogenic-disease microbes, like E. Coli and salmonella, causing the broken down nutrients to be isolated and non-linked with other elements in the matter. This process is called rotting. The non-linked, isolated, fertilizing nutrients usually smell bad as the nitrogen-ammonia and sulfur compounds are released into the air and, with the help of rain, are washed down below root level into the water table. The anaerobic/non-oxygenated process, still very widespread, is wasteful of a great potential fertilizer, and is a major cause of environmental pollution!

The challenges of competition and globalization have transformed agriculture as we know it; the small family farm has disappeared in favour of increasingly large agricultural businesses. Direct consequence: A major increase in crop residues and animal waste. Unfortunately, no one has advised producers on the best way to treat and dispose of this waste. The pile of manure has simply been getting larger or the pit has been enlarged ... Thus guaranteeing the rotting of the material, foul odours and a loss of fertilizing matter and this is without counting the negative impacts on the environment.

It would be very difficult, even impossible, to go back in time and change the ways manure and other organic wastes produced by modern agriculture are managed. Fortunately, for over 35 years, a wise man in Germany, Roland Plocher, has been producing natural, efficient and very cost effective products, which have biodynamic resonances of oxygen and other elements embedded into carrier materials like calcium carbonate for treating and aerating animal and plant wastes. These products make it possible to recover the advantages of aerobic decomposition even in an anaerobic environment.

Symbionature is proud to have been importing these products into North America since 2002, where producers have been expressing their satisfaction and appreciation.

For specific dosage and pricing information call our specialists at 1 866 348-3258.

Michael Bernardin, ND President and technical director