FEATURES
Green Manure

by Marcia Passos Duffy
Using nature to eliminate holding ponds

Photos and Illustrations by Christopher Henry.

Sprinkler VTS in operation.

Doug Ferguson is a fifth-generation cattle farmer who wanted to bring his 280 cows home from a commercial feedlot to raise on his own land. But, there was no existing livestock manure treatment system on his family’s farm, and he didn’t want the maintenance hassle and expense of building a holding pond for waste runoff.

“We had the opportunity to start from scratch,” said Ferguson, who runs Ferguson Farm on 1,300 acres in Beatrice, Neb. When told of his dilemma at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, he was put in touch with the state’s prominent livestock manure runoff researcher who has conducted successful tests on small to medium cattle and cow-calf producers (those with 1,000 head or fewer) using a system that is not only sustainable and environmentally friendly, but is also inexpensive and easy to maintain.

Chris Henry, a University of Nebraska- Lincoln systems engineer, has designed a vegetative treatment system (VTS) to control and treat runoff from open livestock lots. While this is a demonstration project in Nebraska, Henry’s goal is to make the system mainstream and a viable option to control runoff for small livestock farms throughout the country. His project has been funded by a Nebraska Environmental Trust grant and has already become a model for similar projects in other states.

What are vegetative treatment systems?

These treatment systems are different from vegetative buffer zones, said Henry. A buffer zone is a narrow strip of vegetation between cropland and a stream (or other surface water) that helps filter some of the pollutants, but does not control any solids or flow. VTS, on the other hand, which uses a much larger area planted with grass or forage, is engineered to take the solid waste runoff using a system of pipes to distribute it to an area of perennial grass that will drink up the water and nutrients from the liquid manure.

The VTS system is gravity-fed (although it can be also work using a pump and sprinkler system), depends on rainwater, and is controlled by the farmer with a simple lever. For an online video on how this system works, visit http://afo.unl.edu (click on left menu, “How To Videos,” then “Vegetative Treatment Systems on Market Journal”).

First, the VTS separates the solids from the liquids in the runoff. There is a settling basin that collects the runoff for 15 to 96 hours. From there, the runoff is slowly released to a vegetative treatment area, which needs to be approximately 1 acre in size for every acre of feedlot.

As the runoff is sent to the treatment acreage it seeps into the soil and prevents it from leaving the farmer’s land. Once the manure runoff hits the soil, nature takes it course and it is used by the plants for nutrients. “What [a VTS] does is store the water in the root system instead of in a pond,” said Henry.

In the last eight years, over 30 VTS systems have been created throughout Nebraska, including a pump-based sprinkler system that uses golf course turf technology to pump runoff onto an alfalfa field. Mobile sprinklers allow the farmer to spread the runoff wherever needed on the field. One Nebraska dairy farmer uses a pump system to occasionally transfer milk house wastewater to a vegetative treatment area.

Haying vegetative treatment area fields.

Benefits of a VTS

A VTS allows the producer to manage runoff problems and eliminates the need for a conventional holding pond or lagoon. “A VTS creates an environmentally sustainable feedlot,” said Henry.

It can also save the producer money. The price tag on a gravity VTS is about $40 per head of cattle; a traditional holding pond would cost twice that amount.

VTS also eliminates the need to take acreage away from the farmland for a holding pond, and makes good use of the land for haying purposes.

“Farmers don’t like having a hole in the ground … they don’t like to give up the productivity of the land,” said Henry. Farmers can take the area that is being used by the VTS and grow hay.

“I got two cuttings off the [1-acre] VTS I put in,” said Ferguson, which he noted exceeded the cuttings on the other (non-VTS) fields where he grew brome. “I had four bales per acre on the other land … off the VTS acre I got 7.5 bales,” he said.

Because of the low odor of a VTS, Ferguson also cites better neighbor relations. “This might be of particular concern in the Northeast where farms are closer to communities,” he said.

The hardest part of creating the VTS on his farm, said Ferguson, was letting go of the idea of a traditional holding lagoon. “Now that I’ve had this for a couple of years, I don’t know why a producer of my size would put in a holding pond,” he said.

VTS could be the wave of the future, particularly as state and federal regulations for runoff become stricter. “The days of putting up an open lot without runoff control are over,” said Ferguson.

The author is a freelance writer from Keene, N.H., and longtime contributor to Farming.