Problems and successess of digestate utilization on crops

In Hungary - like in the EU - the legislation and regulation of handling of animal residues are likely to be increasingly stringent. Therefore farmers are trying to find the environmentally sound methods of these processes. Anaerobic digestion (AD) is one of the possibilities which can reduce the likelihood of causing land and ground water pollution.

The main end product of AD is energy, but there are two other outputs: solid and liquid residues of digesting process. After separation of these two phases, the solid one is advised to be composted while the liquid one - the digestate - can be used as a nutrient source in agriculture. Advantages of digested organic material are for example, the increased availability of nitrogen for plant growth, reduction of bad odours because of volatile carbon compound degradation, increase of soil biological activity, killing weed germs and pathogen microorganisms. The regulation of digestate use as a nutrient supply is very strict in Hungary. The first problem is that the category of digestate is missing in the regulations. The authority is mistrustful about the digestate because we have not got experiences about its effects on the plants and soils. We tried to find data in the literature, but we were not too successful. There are a lot of books and articles, but only the positive effects of the digestate are discussed, in a general approach (as we mentioned above). Our experiments were started in 2005 with the digestate originated from one of the largest biogas plant in Europe, which is located in the city of Nyírbátor in Hungary. The rates of the digestate to be applied were determined by its actual nitrogen content, because N is one of the main macronutrients for plants, but it could be a serious environmental pollution if leached to the soil water and accumulates in it. The digestate contains a lot of water; therefore we applied the same quantity of water in the experiments, where it was technically available. Our test plants were winter wheat, triticale, sweet corn, silage maize, alfalfa, sunflower, soybean, which were studied in field pot, small plot and field scale experiments. Digestate was sprinkled either by an irrigation equipment via stand-alone pipeline or by a slurry-tanker in the plot and field-scale experiments. We used a measuring-tube in the pot experiment. Physico-chemical properties of the soil samples and the inside content values of test plants were measured according to the Hungarian Standard in the Central Agricultural Laboratory of CASE of UD. The crop yield of test plants was measured after harvesting.



Copyright: © European Compost Network ECN e.V.
Quelle: Orbit 2008 (Oktober 2008)
Seiten: 7
Preis: € 7,00
Autor: Marianna Makádi
Attila Tomócsik
J. Lengyel
Árpád Márton
 
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