Jeff Lewis, owner of the 220-cow MU Juice Dairy, which started up in 1979, had been using a lot of different products to deal with his lagoon’s waste odor. These others were all basically dry products.
The lagoons at MU Juice Dairy are lined and virtually impossible to clean sludge from. The dairy found that the dried product simply did not work on the lagoon. “When BioLynceus came in, my lagoon was covered with a crust close to one inch thick,” says Lewis.
Mark Sembach, independent sales rep for BioLynceus LLC, a company based in Lyons, CO, says that when he first visited the dairy, he realized the dry packets of microbes weren’t working. “Within a 20–30 foot radius of where the dry microbe packets were thrown in, digestion could be seen going on, but the rest of the lagoon was completely covered with sludge and not working at all,” he says. “We started dripping our product into the milking parlor drain, which emptied into the lagoon, and came back three weeks later and found the entire surface of the lagoon was clear.” Timers work with a battery-operated metering valve which opens, up to four times a day and automatically injects/drips product into the drain. Injections are timed to coincide with when the dairy flushes clean water through the drain system.
“It’s best not to inject a live microbial product into the drain system when they are using teat washes, hoof washes or other sterilization activities that will kill the microbes,” Sembach says. “Ninety-eight percent of our BioLynceus products are liquid and contain live microbial organisms. Generally, if you take water away from an organism it will either go dormant or die, and if you vacuum-pack your organisms, as some companies do, you have just taken oxygen away, so organisms within the packet will be completely dead.”
All of MU Juice’s barn waste is scraped into a holding pen where it runs through a separator. The majority of the solids are used for compost, which is then sold. The liquid portion of the waste goes into the dairy’s lagoon. Some microbes go into the compost, and some go into the wastewater lagoon.
“When I first started to work with MU Juice Dairy, the smell from the lagoon would about take away your breath,” says Sembach. “To get things started, we added double the amount of BioScrubber I required in order to inoculate the system during the first two weeks. After the two-week inoculation period, we reduced the amount of BioScrubber I injected into the lagoon based on the total number of cows milked per day. Later we cut it back to the normal rate used throughout the entire system. The amount of our product used is based on the number of cows that are milked each day.”
The microbes then make their way out to the holding pond. When Sembach first started working with MU Juice, the dairy emptied its holding tank every day because so much sludge had built up on the sides that it had decreased usable holding space available. Now the dairy goes three or four days before emptying the holding tank because the microbes have digested and cleaned out the manure holding pen so well.
Lewis recently pumped his lagoon out and found it had only a small amount of thickness around the edges. Other than that, it contained only water. “I would have never believed the results we have obtained had Mark not taken before and after photos of our lagoon. During the course of working 30 days you see the lagoon daily, and it is hard to remember what it looked like 30 days ago, but in 30 days the crust was gone, replaced with bubbles. It worked, and I was a believer.”
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| Microbial enzymes may be used for treating sludge in a dairy lagoon. |
“The sign of a nicely balanced dairy lagoon is one with lots of bubbles coming up from the off-gassing taking place during digestion,” says Sembach. “It is the same thing for an oil sludge lagoon.”
MU Juice Dairy has used the microbes for a year and a half now. With the BioLynceus system the barrel is set up and the organism is in there growing all the time. Under normal conditions, the valve on the barrel opens three times per day. Lewis also tries to keep the valve open when he is running a lot of freshwater into his pit. “That’s so we can get a good number of organisms established before we start washing our system and pound them with a lot of soap and acid,” says Lewis. He likes the ease with which he is able to keep track of everything. The 55-gallon barrel sits close to his bulk tank so it is easy for him to go and check on it. Since the barrel is within a heated barn there’s no problem with the valve on it freezing open. “I don’t have to think about it,” he says. “When the barrel’s empty, we simply get a new one. That happens about every six months. I’m not going to say there are no more odors. Pumping waste solids onto the fields in spring creates odor. You’ll never get rid of that. But it is a different odor now; it’s not as strong as before. I don’t have the smell coming off the lagoon all year long like I used to. I will get odor during wind or rain, but generally it’s not as bad as before.”
Other than the expense of the product (the cost is about 50% higher than what they were paying), Lewis is satisfied with both the product and the service. “BioLynceus is constantly checking on things, making sure the flow rate is right so we’re not using too much product,” says Lewis. “They’ve been great to work with. What we were putting in before wasn’t getting the job done. Despite the added costs up front, I think the payoff comes in the long run with things running smoother.”
BioLynceus LLC handles wastewater treatment, both municipal and industrial, reclamation work on freshwater ponds, agricultural water treatment, and turfgrass water. BioLynceus started in 1994, and began working with dairies in that same year. BioLynceus focuses on environmental cleanup: basically the removal of hydrocarbons and toxic spills in groundwater, surface water and soils. Over the years the company has worked on hydrocarbon contaminations of soils in the refining industry.
Its mission has been to do all of its processes as naturally as possible. With over 700 formulations for different types of remediation as well as custom blending of applications such as microbial bases, nutrients and organics, BioLynceus also has its own proprietary processes used in injecting its materials. Though the company doesn’t do actual site modifications or build-outs, it can design for the clients to make processes work.
Rick Allen, company founder and chief executive officer, explains the company motto: “Better living through biology.” That means BioLynceus products are high in microbial enzymes, he says, as well as amino acids, some nutrients if needed, and oxygen if needed. After those ingredients are custom-blended, they’re injected into the wastestream. Products may be used for treating sludge in a dairy lagoon or a municipal wastewater treatment plant, for microbially cleaning the collection and trunk lines in a municipal wastewater plant, or for getting rid of hydrocarbon contamination such as TPH and BTEX, in water and soil alike.
“Dairies all need to be treated individually,” says Allen. “There’s not one answer that fits each dairy in America. They have different things hitting their wastewater systems: iodine, copper sulfates, disinfectants and bleach, for example. We have to custom-blend for virtually every dairy. It is the same situation with oil refineries.”
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| Crusts of sludge may form as thick as an inch in some lagoons. |
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| Dairies are different, and no single treatment plan is likely to fit them all. |
The trick is to equalize the activity so that you are taking care of everything coming into the lagoon, plus remediating the problems in the lagoons, usually too much sludge on the bottom. Once over-stimulation occurs, solids will eventually rise to the top. “But it is a fine line between these two events,” says Allen. “We’ve had it happen to us a couple of times. This is more about too much microbial activity than about too much respiration.”
As the microbes work on the sludge materials on the bottom, they build up gases such as carbon dioxides and ammonia underneath the sludge. A small amount of material rising up once in awhile is a good thing, according to Allen. But when the whole bottom mass rises to the top, this material begins to dry and then the microbes cannot go to work on it. The idea is to keep a circulation of solids, up to the top and then back down to the bottom, going on continually.
“From my perspective, the two biggest problems that these dairies were experiencing were sludge buildup and odor,” says Sembach.
Huls Dairy Inc., on 600 acres—and also in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley—has been in the Grade-A dairy business since 1951. The dairy is owned by the four Huls brothers and their wives: Dan and Joan, Bruce and Pat, Tim and Trudy, Jeff and Julie. The brothers’ father and grandfather started the first Grade-A dairy in Ravalli County. Tim is President of the Montana Dairy Association. The huge barn at the dairy has a high-tech milking carousel that was developed in Australia. The cows step onto a rotating platform; the udder is then prepared and milkers attached. When milking is complete, the computerized system detaches the milking unit, the post dip is applied, and the cows back off the platform.
“Once the cows got used to this they’ve really enjoyed the ride,” says Dan Huls. “This system means the cows are now coming to the operator instead of the operator coming to the cows.”
In 2003 the dairy operation was moved into a new facility, and switched from straw bedding to a new automated scraping system that works continuously and allows wastes to be collected in a lagoon. The waste is then loaded into a Houle self-loading manure spreader and spread on the fields. Shortly after the Hulses opened their new facility, they also noticed a distinct change in odor with an increase in ammonia and other smells. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the old dairy featured 150 head of cattle and used straw bedding, whereas the new one has 350 cows in free stalls and uses the automated manure collection system. The characteristic of the waste changed significantly.
“When we used straw for bedding in our earlier dairy, it would heat and start to compost while it was actually in use,” says Huls. “We find that the liquid manure system that we have now doesn’t do that. I think this was a main factor in the change in the odor.”
In order to mitigate the new odor problems, the Hulses started to use a dry bagged bacterial product. They found it helped a little bit, but it also helped them to realize that control of the odor through biological processes was definitely feasible.
“During that process we became aware of BioLynceus, and we installed a barrel of their BioScrubber,” he says. “That is injected into our manure system with a very simple automated dispensing system that runs off batteries: simply a valve that opens and is timer-controlled, not unlike an automated irrigation timer on a front yard.”
The BioScrubber is injected into their system by means of gravity pressure in the 55-gallon barrel while it sits up on a rack. “We took a proactive approach when odor became more of an issue with our new dairy’s system and decided we had to solve this problem,” says Huls. “Our manure is spread in the fields right next to our house and we noticed a dramatic change in odor with the new system. With the addition of the BioScrubber, the difference is like night and day.”
“The biggest problem with what we had before—what I like to call ‘bugs in a bag’—was that you had to remember to throw the bag in every day or two. That was just one more thing to do. The 55-gallon barrel lasts several months. All we have to do is monitor the barrel. We know the product gets in there every day—actually three times a day.”
Huls feeds the microbes into the stream that goes directly into the lagoon, which fills from the bottom up. Since these are anaerobic bacteria, they have no trouble working on the lagoon bottom where there is a lack of oxygen.
“BioLynceus sampled our lagoon beforehand, mainly just to know the correct volume of microbes needed to get the results we were looking for,” says Huls. “Everything has been very straightforward in the two and a half years we’ve been working with them. So far, we have been very satisfied with our results.”
Huls Dairy does not use a flush system, and it does not add any water. Its system was designed with a digester in mind, so the only water added is when one of the cow water containers is cleaned. The wastes are used on the dairy’s alfalfa, corn, and barley crops. Most of the effluent is used on their silage corn, where it is of most benefit to the dairy.
Huls keeps his barrel of microbes in an insulated structure. Once, during extremely cold weather, the solution did freeze at the bottom of the barrel. They noticed an increase in odor after this occurred, but as soon as more solution was added the odor improved. “We have no doubt that it works,” says Huls.
“What is really amazing about the Huls Dairy is that there is a 10-acre plot of land right next to the dairy that someone bought,” says Sembach. “That individual started to build a house that looks out over the lagoon and over to the snow-capped Bitterroot Mountains. Dan Huls spoke to this individual and offered to swap him for 10 acres of his own land a mile a half down the road. But the individual made the statement that the dairy did not smell. When you drive onto the dairy property, you don’t smell the lagoon anymore: You smell the feed that they give to their cows.
Huls does not separate the solid from the liquid manure. All dairy barn waste goes into a lagoon that is periodically pumped and spread onto the dairy’s crop production areas.
“I’m amazed at what these microbes can do,” says Sembach. “I would really like for dairies to start using our products in their soils, too, as pumping dairy waste into the ground has tremendous impacts. Salts go up, as does the amount of nutrient in the soil and effluent in runoff. Our microbes would help to ‘tie-up’ these nutrients in the soil and process the nutrients into forms available for plant uptake.”
Over the years BioLynceus has adopted something of a “microbial soup,” basically, which contains a large variety of different microbial species within it. This is then blended with other products—other microbes or nutrients—to make the system works better. The company does not try to isolate one particular microbe that does one particular thing.
“We have a bigger picture approach; we find a series of microbes does a better job of doing a number of different tasks such as breaking down hydrocarbons, magnesium, calcium, or sodium,” says Allen. One of the dairies in Montana that BioLynceus is working with is looking into installing a methane cover over its lagoon. Allen finds that most dairies are not willing to put out the expense to do such covers. “These can cost hundreds of thousands,” says Allen. “The places that are able to obtain a university grant may typically install such covers. But most are not willing to spend that much money.”
Allen contends that his company is more about odor control, solids removal, and changing the environment of the lagoon system enough so that the hydrogen sulfides are no longer a problem, which is where most of the odor comes from. “We add to the base with microbials that are in our products and also stimulate the indigenous microbials in the system to get them more active,” says Allen. “It’s basically a combination of both methods. Every environment is different. Because there may not be enough of one microbe in a system or because it may not be existent at all, due to the way the system’s run, we feel that where we’re beneficial is we not only stimulate the indigenous but are also adding microbials that may be either deficient or nonexistent in that particular environment.
“We might think we have a handle on things, but we still get surprises every day. As soon as I think I’ve seen it all, I find out otherwise.”
Because microbial life works better in warmer environments, dairies in the northern tier of states face challenges from cold temperatures. Despite this fact, BioLynceus’ microbes are still fairly adept at working in both hot and cold temperatures, according to Allen. “We have actually injected our microbes into waste streams that were 140 to 180° F, and the organisms still lived and worked for us,” says Allen. “And we find that during Montana winters our products are still working.”
In many cases it’s a question of blending applications to meet whatever a dairy’s current situation is. Another challenge that BioLynceus faces is when a dairy is doing fine with “ABC” additives for years and then all of a sudden decides to add “part X.”
“Sometimes adding that part X can turn the whole dairy upside down,” says Allen. “Then we have to reevaluate to figure out what we need to do to, such as make adjustments, to offset the additive that’s been placed in the system.
Allen finds that the wastewater systems for agricultural projects are interesting. “But the systems for municipal and industrial are far more challenging to work with,” says Allen. “We try to work with the microbiology within the system. We’ve had pretty significant results in reducing the sodium contaminations and those sorts of things.”
PETER HILDEBRANDT is a writer specializing in science and engineering topics.
OW - July/August 2006 |
