Can collect hundreds of millions of dollars from waste manure

At the same time repel the pressure of environmental pollution generated from the housing. Currently, the scale of the livestock sector in Vietnam is around 17 million households, of which nearly 11 million poultry households, 4 million pig households and about 2.5 million households raising cattle. Of these, only 23,000 are farm households that are partially or wholly employed by modern industry. As I mentioned in the previous article ("Transforming waste, agricultural by-products into money"), the use of biogas will contribute to reducing pollution from animal waste. Produces a useful source of gas for humans.

However, if the capacity of the biogas plant does not match the size of the herd of livestock, or does not use up all the gas generated from the biogas digester, it will increase the environmental pollution (especially on the sites). Medium and large farms). Why do not we turn this huge amount of waste into high value commercial products? Recently, I went to work in the Central Highlands. Here, dry cow dung is collected spontaneously for transport to Dak Lak for sale to micro organic composting establishments.

The organic compost market here is quite developed. I visited some manufacturing facilities. They produce peanut, sugarcane residue, sugarcane by-products, dried cow manure, etc with NPK fertilizers, cost of VND 2.7 million per ton, sold to cashew farmers. Pepper, coffee about 4.5-5 million / ton, potential huge consumption. I know that Vietnam loses about $ 4 billion a year to fertilizer for crops, with domestic supplies only meeting more than half, the rest being imported from abroad (data In 2012, Vietnam imported about $ 1.8 billion of chemical fertilizers).

At the conference "Using Fertilizers and Chemicals in Agricultural Cultivation" organized by MARD in early November, Associate Professor Pham Quang Ha, Deputy Director of Institute of Agricultural Environment, said that Over the years, the consumption of chemical fertilizers in Vietnam has increased. However, the effect of using fertilizers is quite low when over 50% of mineral fertilizers are washed out into the environment. On average, each year the domestic industry is wasting over 5 million tons of assorted fertilizers, equivalent to at least $ 2 billion.

The wasteful and wasteful use of fertilizers causes many unpredictable and economic consequences for the farmers in particular and the whole society. If the market for organic fertilizers from animal waste (about 80 million tons of solid waste per year) is replaced, the economic value will be very high (if only one substitute The very small portion of 5% of the $ 4 billion of chemical fertilizers used annually by organic fertilizers will reduce imports of fertilizers by $ 200 million a year.)

For chicken manure, the demand for flower and ornamental plants is quite large. Therefore, the output is not ominous. However, the consumption of pig manure is very little. As a rule, when transporting fresh manure, there must be a special tank truck to avoid the risk of spreading the disease. At the same time the water content in pig manure is quite large (due to mixed in the process of pumping water to wash cages, urine ...). Fortunately, the market has emerged machines capable of squeezing fresh manure into dry manure.

The price of each kind of press machine about 80 million VND, can press about 15 kg per hour. In the past, Bayer Company has offered for sale floating presses with a capacity of 15-25 m3 / hr for $ 18,000 / unit, quite suitable for Vietnam market. Thus, a household can buy stool presses for collecting services for other households. For pig producers it is necessary to have a storage tank with lid closed, when the full tank will call the service to squeeze feces to suction. Small amounts of wastewater left after squeezing are sent to the biogas reactor for further treatment of the living gas.

If the large-scale organic fertilizer production model from the livestock waste that the project is successfully pursued, the collection system of livestock waste from households will be automatically formed to provide raw material for factories. At the same time, this model will help to thoroughly deal with environmental pollution in the context of fixed capacity biogas plants where the scale of livestock often change or lead to too Loading tunnel. In my opinion, this is a very right direction. Due to the fact that many units producing organic fertilizer from peat are having difficulties in purchasing raw materials. Meanwhile, animal waste is a source of renewable raw materials but is being discharged causing environmental pollution.

Dr. NGUYEN THE HINH

Director of the Central Low Carbon Agriculture Project Management Board