Pig Poo

PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: Farmers in Australia's intensive livestock industries are increasingly seeing manure as a source of income rather than a cost and pork producers have been leading the way in converting poo into profit. Seven farms are now earning carbon credits by capturing methane gas for the Government's Emissions Reduction Fund, but many more are converting biogas into energy. Some of the newest research is even looking at how manure could replace synthetic fertilisers, and surprisingly, be converted into stockfeed. Sean Murphy with this report.

SEAN MURPHY, REPORTER: There's no delicate way of putting it. This is a story about - well, you get the picture. At Blantyre Farms, they're turning poo into profit, converting methane gas into power and carbon credits.

EDWINA BEVERIDGE, BLANTYRE FARMS: How it works is the manure from the pigs up in the sheds falls down into a pit and then gets flushed every day. That comes down here to this pond. In this pond, it's held here for about 50 days, but it's also continuously draining off liquid. So the manure comes in here, we capture the methane gas that is then used to power our generators.

SEAN MURPHY: Edwina Beveridge is a former big city chartered accountant who's been running the family piggery at Young in central New South Wales since 2007. Turning her 25,000-pig enterprise into a carbon farm made good sense - dollars and cents.

EDWINA BEVERIDGE: Economically, it's been a wonderful project. The project did cost us about $1 million, but it had a two and a half-year payback period, which luckily was about a year ago. It's - we had a big gas and electricity bill. It used to cost us $15,000 a month for electricity and gas and now we get paid $5,000 a month for selling excess electricity.

SEAN MURPHY: The pork industry was the first in Australian agriculture to come up with a scientifically sound methodology for carbon abatement. Seven producers now earn about $7 million from the Government's Emissions Reduction Fund.

EDWINA BEVERIDGE: The methane that used to come off our pig manure is no longer being released into the environment, so we're burning that now through the generator, so we can earn carbon credits for that. So not only did the biogas project have good economical sense, it's good for the environment as well. Who would think a pig farmer could also be a renewable energy supplier?

SEAN MURPHY: Australian Pork Ltd and the Pork Cooperative Research Centre are part of a new push by Australia's intensive livestock industries to find new ways of turning waste into income.

ROB WILSON, PORK CO-OP RESEARCH CENTRE: We've got a target to try and reduce the carbon footprint or the greenhouse gas emissions down to one kilogram of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of meat. That's a measure of the intensity of greenhouse gases on the farm. A farm now, without doing any biogas capture and use, could have a figure around five or six kilograms, so to get it down to one is very good. There are about 14 installations now around Australia of various sizes and most of them are generating both heating power and electricity through big cogenerators and some are putting electricity into the grid as well.

SEAN MURPHY: According to Dr Rob Wilson, biogas systems are saving up to $5 on the cost of producing each pig in 500-sow or larger operations. But he says there are big savings also possible for small and medium-sized piggeries. New research is also looking at carbon savings from better feed efficiency and even growing feed from effluent.

At Murdoch University's Algae Research & Development Centre in WA, they're trying to produce stockfeed from pig effluent. Dr Navid Moheimani says some micro algae and even seaweeds can thrive on pig waste, even with high levels of ammonia and phosphate.

NAVID MOHEIMANI, MURDOCH UNIVERSITY: So the algae normally contains one-third carbohydrate or sugar, one-third protein and one-third liquid. The beauty of the carbohydrate with algae that a lot of algae do not produce a lot of cellulose. That means that they're very easily digestible. The other very important thing for us is find out what sort of other bacteria, like pathogens potentially coming with the feed and so we also testing that. And again, in a year - in a matter of a year we should be able to easily say: is that produced feed suitable for feeding to the pigs or not?

SEAN MURPHY: Even if the algae is not suitable feedstock, it would generate more methane production and potentially more biofuel on farm.

So proving the concept is one thing, but whether or not it's cost-effective, that's a key question.

NAVID MOHEIMANI: Economy, economy and economy. Technically, we can grow the algae on this waste. Feasibility is another thing that we're trying to find out. So at the end of the project, we sit back, put all the numbers together and see if it's going to be actually cost effective for the piggeries or not. It would also be depends on the economy of scale, so it may not work in one particular piggeries, but it may work for another piggery. It depends on the size of the waste, depends on the amount of effluent that they're producing.

SEAN MURPHY: At the University of WA, another research project is aimed at diluting the highly-concentrated nature of pig poo into a user-friendly fertiliser. It's part of the National Agricultural Manure Management Program, looking across all intensive livestock production and is headed by Dr Sasha Jenkins.

SASHA JENKINS, UNIVERSITY OF WA: So what we're doing is we're essentially converting that into a more refined, nutritionally-balanced product that is easier to handle, transport and apply. Particularly this one is the pelletised form and that can actually go down with the air seeder, so it can be put in combination with a synthetic fertiliser.

SEAN MURPHY: Typically, about a quarter of the cost of growing broadacre crops such as wheat come from synthetic fertilisers. Supplementing that with cheaper manure-based fertiliser or even replacing it altogether could mean huge savings.

SASHA JENKINS: There isn't lot of scientific-based evidence so a lot of my research now is actually looking at what are the risks of adding manure, what are the benefits of adding manure and quantifying those and also trying to work out the mechanisms - if they do benefit the soils, how are they actually doing that?

SEAN MURPHY: In early field trials in the WA Wheatbelt, Dr Jenkins says manure performed better than synthetic fertilisers.

SASHA JENKINS: We're seeing a trend towards increased productivity yield and also the grain quality in the treatments that have received the manures, particularly the more refined, better quality manures, such as the compost and the pelletised manure. It's still very early days. We need to repeat these field trials over numerous seasons to see if we actually see an increase in that trend. That trend actually then becomes significant.

SEAN MURPHY: The research has also yielded groundbreaking results on greenhouse gas emissions from soil treated with manure. It found there was a big difference in WA's semi-arid soils to what occurs in the Northern Hemisphere. Until now, Australia has relied on European models for its baseline data on greenhouse emissions.

JANINE PRICE, AUSTRALIAN PORK LTD: That's extremely significant because that data that's been generated from that project and the other NAMMP projects goes into the Australian accounts inventory, so we can now say well this is actually what's happening on feedlots, on piggeries, on broiler farms, on egg layer farms, so that's now going into the national accounts. It's also being upgraded in all our industry models, so when we run our greenhouse calculators and our nutrient balance calculators, we've got up-to-date data into that.

SEAN MURPHY: Australian Pork Ltd says environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and waste-management are a top research priority, even though the industry produces just 0.4 per cent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. It represents a seismic shift in thinking, where waste is no longer seen as a cost, but rather an opportunity.

JANINE PRICE: Main problem was that people didn't know what to do with it. So basically we saw a lot of, across all agricultural industries, stockpiling their manures, just putting it out over the land in a way that they weren't actually getting the maximum benefit from it, whereas we can now say to them, "This is the nutrients in it, this is the area that you need to put it over and this is the best time to spread it on as well, because if you spread it when the crops are actively growing and in times where there's not going to be run-off, you're going to get the best benefit from that."

SEAN MURPHY: At Blantyre Farms, they're developing a closed-loop system for waste, energy and water management and that extends to recycling food otherwise destined for landfill.

EDWINA BEVERIDGE: This one in particular is a failed pet food. You can probably see the bits of dog biscuits there. And we've been using this for about 20 years. We use about 100 tonnes of it a week and it's great pig feed. It's made of, you know, grain and protein meals and all the other things that you'd normally be putting into the feed.

SEAN MURPHY: The closed loop also means effluent is also used to fertilise and irrigate crops at Blantyre for the farm's own feed production. Edwina Beveridge says her big challenge now is to better use her surplus power. 60 per cent of the electricity generated on farm is currently sold back to the grid for a quarter of what power costs.

EDWINA BEVERIDGE: On our farm we have excess heat from the generators. We also have spare power, so currently we're selling our power back to the grid, but not getting paid very much for it and we have lots of pig manure and nutrients. So those three things, we've often wondered what we can do to use them, whether it would be growing tomatoes or growing algae or something like that to better make use of those resources.