Money and Manure Matters

Handling manure can be costly. A farm in Kansas was spending up to $90,000 each year to pick up manure solids, but now the costs have dropped significantly.

Since November of 2000, Lee Holtmeier has been managing the Linn Willow Creek Dairy LLC outside Linn, Kan. Prior to that, he’d worked 20 years for Farmland Foods buying hogs and grew up auctioneering cattle and hogs at his family’s sale barn business in Nebraska. The only experience he’d had with dairy cows is when he started breeding cattle for Willow Creek Dairy when the dairy began operations in 1999.

While he didn’t know some of the intricacies of dairy farming, Holtmeier did know how to manage people and spot problems. “We’ve changed a lot of things and moved some things around,” Holtmeier says of his time at the farm the past 17 years.

One of those major changes was improving how manure was handled. Prior to 2007, the dairy was spending anywhere from $80,000 to $90,000 per year hiring dump trucks and excavators to take out the manure solids from three settling bays and three lagoons in the spring and fall. Not only was it costly, it also had a larger environmental footprint with several heavy machines being run to pick up manure.

In 2007, a sand and manure solid separation system was installed. The installation costs were about $50,000 for the screen separator, and cost shares through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program paid for the building housing the equipment.

Now, Holtmeier says the cleanup process only happens once every other year instead of twice a year. He’s seeing a savings of at least $50,000 in manure pickup during an average year.

Local farmers use the solids that are extracted from the separator to spread on their fields as compost.

“Could I be selling it? Yeah, probably because I know a lot of people do,” Holtmeier says. “On the other hand. whenever you sell it as a compost product you have to guarantee an analysis.”

Savings justify change

Holtmeier feels the savings he traded in going from the settling bay and lagoon system to separation is enough reason to justify the change rather than chasing more profit from compost. There still are some operating costs associated with electricity to run the screen separator and general maintenance, but it is a fraction of what it took to hire regular manure cleanup.

Another benefit from the manure solids has been farmers who use the solids are getting added soil nutrients. A few even sell their forage back to Willow Creek Dairy. Liquid from the lagoons is used to fertilize and irrigate neighboring fields as well.

Sand bedding is found throughout the free stall barns at the dairy that house the 1,700 cows on the farm. Five monoslope barns are set on a 0.5 percent slope helping gravity flow all of the flush water from the barns that is used to clean the alleyways. Water from the flush system is reused and alleys are flushed three times per day.

Sand ends up in a lane at the end of each building where there is another 0.5 percent slope down to the screen separator area’s concrete pit. Roughly 90% of the sand is reclaimed by letting the moisture leach out for at least a week in gravity flow pile. Moisture from the sand pile drains into the pit. One year, Willow Creek Dairy didn’t even have to purchase sand because there was enough reclaimed sand from recycling.

The main pit gets deeper as it heads towards the agitator with an ending depth of 15’. An overflow allows excess water to go into a nearby lagoon should there be an equipment breakdown or flooding.

As the agitator works it separates the sand, manure and water. Sometimes there are larger amounts of manure solids that need to be picked up. Fortunately, the pit was built wide enough so a loader can be driven in for cleanup. The adjacent screen separator pulls out the manure solids that will eventually be spread on neighboring farm fields during the off-season for growing crops.

Holtmeier does think there could have been improvements made in hindsight. “If I had to do it all over again I would taper the corners so there wasn’t a dead spot before entering agitator,” Holtmeier says. It would create more of a 45° funnel instead of two 90° angles. He also would decrease the width of the pit a little bit to help improve the flow of water.

Note: This story appears in the June 2017 issue of Dairy Herd Management.