Story
Taiwan’s hog farms faced problems with manure treatment. Because of the conventional and old waste treatment facilities were built from decades ago, it’s difficult and costly to reconstruct one to meet modern needs. Additionally, there is a tide of combining biogas generation with pastoral wastewater purification recently; however, for a small-scale hog farm, biogas generation solutions could cost them 20 million dollars, which is nearly impossible to afford it.
My team, Agriforward, a social enterprise providing sustainable and circular agriculture solutions with technologies and social innovation, we propose a new circular solution concept called “5Rs”: Redesign, Reduce, Recycle, Recovery, and Resilience, assists clients with implementing these concepts to tackle their issues.
Instead of facility reconstruction, we redesign the whole process of manure treatment and link it with environmental purpose farms, which could both purify disposed water and benefit to improve farm fertility. The total solution contains special microorganism called photo-synthetic bacteria (PSB) recycled from disposed water which could effectively reduce the concentration of ammonia nitrogen of water, and also a pump with IoT-based valve-controller that could remotely control and maintain functions of pumps and provide proper growing conditions for PSB cultivation in disposed water in an energy-saving way. After applying our circular solution, the hog farm eventually meets government’s standard of drain water.
Microorganism like PSB owns lots of benefits. First of all, it could be recycled and scaled up quantity from hog’s disposed water and reduce the concentration of ammonia nitrogen of water when PSB is added to specific concentration. Secondly, PSB could benefits sustainable farming for promoting plants’ nutrition absorption ability and lower the abundance of pests and weeds while production. Moreover, PSB could also help plants recover from overdose fertilized and improper pest control treatments. As a result, we not only introduce PSB to tackle hog manure treatment issue, but also extend the application to eco-friendly-pursued farming management. We have successfully used PSB on pomelo orchard that used to overdose pesticide and herbicide to achieve a high-quality production without chemical usage.
According to our solution, we redesign conventional hog manure treatment process; recycle good materials from disposed water; make use of recycled PSB to reduce ammonia nitrogen of disposed water and herbicide or pesticide usage of pomelo farming management; help pomelo orchard recover from improper pest control; and finally letting hog farm and pomelo orchard reach a comparatively resilience environmental condition.
