By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, concluded last Friday. At this event diplomats from 192 nations were warned about the dangers of greenhouse gases and their affect on enhancing global warming.

Closer to home, and along those same lines, Ohio State University Extension agricultural researchers and engineers are just as concerned about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, they’ve discovered that technology to mitigate odor and air quality concerns on livestock farms thanks to impermeable manure covers.

“Manure covers are a small step in the right direction,” said Lingying Zhao, an Ohio State University Extension agricultural engineer. “Farmers don’t generally use manure covers because they’re too costly. But the carbon credit programs and the loan support to use manure covers to mitigate climate change are now available to allow farmers to obtain these covers at a fraction of the cost, or, if the farm is big enough, at no cost at all.”

It’s been discovered that manure storage covers, originally designed to control odors on dairy, swine and other livestock facilities, can also capture greenhouse gases such as methane, which is more harmful to the environment in terms of global warming effects than carbon dioxide.

The collected methane can be traded for carbon credits on carbon trading markets, where the amount of gas measured is converted to its carbon equivalent. The amount the carbon is worth is then paid back to the farmer.

“Manure covers originally started out as natural materials, such as straw, and they were placed over manure lagoons,” Zhao said. “But they weren’t impermeable to gas emissions and degraded over time.

“Today’s manure covers are made out of impermeable, synthetic materials that can last 10 or 15 years.”

Zhao said that research is finding manure covers are serving more purposes than just controlling odors and reducing neighbor complaints.

“Manure covers can capture harmful greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide,” Zhao said. “Methane is estimated to be 21 times as intense a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, while nitrous oxide is 300 times more intense.”

Zhao said the greenhouse gases captured could then be put to environmentally-friendly uses. Methane, for example, could be used as a biogas. And, manure covers capture ammonia, increasing the value of manure used as a fertilizer.

“Without manure covers, anywhere from 36 percent to 90 percent of nitrogen is being lost to the atmosphere as ammonia,” Zhao said.
Providing quantifiable information for farmers about the value of manure covers is still a work in progress, Zhao said. Zhao and her colleagues have held manure cover workshops throughout Ohio to educate producers on these covers and their benefits.

“We’re researching how much methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia manure covers can capture,” she said. “We hope to develop a model that farmers can follow that will enable them to estimate methane production throughout certain times of the year for any given livestock operation.”

While manure covers are a small fix to the climate change concerns some, like Wendy Mann, say it’s a step in the right direction in helping control climate change.

“The amount of food on our tables will be directly affected by the onset of hotter, drier climates,” said Mann, a senior adviser with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations. “If climate change isn’t altered, rising food prices will increase even further. Food security and climate change are the two key priorities on the international agenda today.”

Mann said that with less water, higher temperatures and more people, farmers will need to grow more with less. She also added that balmier year-round temperatures are expected to breed new pests and give familiar seasonal bugs lengthier lives.

And Mann acknowledges that farming has a great impact on climate change, adding that impermeable manure covers is one small step towards a larger solution.

“Raising livestock already accounts for about 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions,” Mann said. “There’s a strong relationship between agriculture and climate change, and there’s a danger of ignoring this relationship.”

One organization, Environmental Credit Corp., has been leading efforts to establish cost-effective, long-term projects with farmers who reduce greenhouse gases. One of these projects involves manure covers, and using such covers today is Miedema Dairy in Circleville, Ohio.

The dairy farm runs the first lagoon cover in this state, capturing methane, which is then measured and registered annually as carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

There are also funding opportunities for manure covers offered through the Natural Resource Conservation Service as part of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Based on the conservation measures outlined in the 2008 farm bill, 60 percent of the funds to support EQIP will be used for livestock waste management.