Nutritional and Management Abatement Strategies for Improvement of Poultry Air and Water Quality

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Air and water quality concerns associated with poultry operations pose an increasing challenge for the industry and its future viability. The purpose of this study is implement practical and cost-effective technologies such as vegetative environmental buffers to minimize air quality concerns and evaluate composting techniques of litter and carcasses to address water quality issues.

<p>
APPROACH: To abate emissions from poultry house fans; address nuisance complaints, and minimize water quality impacts from poultry farms; demonstrations using vegetative environmental buffers on commercial broiler farms will be implemented and evaluated. This will include ongoing demonstrations as well as new efforts. In situations where vegetative environmental buffers is not appropriate or inadequate to address the air quality concerns, innovative technologies such as windbreak walls and in-house abatement chemistry will be installed and evaluated. With the shortage of bedding materials for the poultry industry, in-house composting of litter between flocks will be studied on commercial farms. In collaboration with and support of the local poultry companies and state agencies, an in-house composting strategy will be implemented and evaluated to reduce waste generation; eliminate cake removal and storage issues between flocks; sequence house cleanouts to match crop utilization schedules and avoid outside litter stockpiling; decrease nutrient solubility; and improve poultry health particularly on disease challenged farms. Research and demonstrations will continue with the use of the water-base foam technology for mass depopulation of poultry flocks due to a catastrophic disease event such as avian influenza. When appropriate, these on-farm demonstrations will follow up with in-house or outside windrow composting for biosecure and environmentally safe disposal of the infected carcasses and litter. Additional in-house litter composting between flocks as well as catastrophic mortality composting demonstrations will evaluate optimum parameters for composting and will include biological additives to enhance these procedures. In all of the objectives listed above, this will not involve any university base research with birds, only the use of commercial flocks and events that can be implemented under existing field situations. A critical aspect of the all the objectives listed above will be rapid dissemination of the information. In addition to local, national and international oral presentations; narrated presentations will be loaded on the web for distribution. These web-base presentations will be continually updated as new information becomes available on each subject.