Waste-cleaning technology getting test in Lancaster County

MANHEIM, Pa. - On a warm July morning inside the cavernous dairy barn of Kreider Farms, 1,200 cows go about their daily business.

The black-and-white Holsteins munch top-secret feed mix. They lounge in stalls with giant fans overhead and water misters when the humidity spikes. And they mosey over to the modern milking parlor twice a day, where they hop on the cow carousel to be milked.

The milk is shipped by tanker truck to a plant to be bottled or turned into ice cream. The fate of what comes out the hind end is less appetizing.

Mechanized rakes roll through the barn, forcing manure into drains with conveyor belts that ferry it to a giant lagoon. There, the cow poop waits to be sprayed onto crops as fertilizer.

Until now, that is.

An environmental-technology company, mindful of manure's polluting effects on the Chesapeake Bay and other watersheds, is trying something new.

Untreated fertilizer is high in nitrogen and phosphorus that migrate slowly to waterways, wreaking havoc with the ecological balance and aquatic life. But Colorado-based Bion Environmental Technologies is betting the farm - Kreider Farms, which sprawls over 3,500 Lancaster County acres - that it can turn millions of pounds of cow waste into safe fertilizer and renewable energy.

Bion has installed a multimillion-dollar demonstration project, set to be formally unveiled here Thursday, to test new technology designed to confront the leading pollutant threatening the Chesapeake and other watersheds: "nutrient waste."

The manure is funneled into a machine, similar to what's used in the pulp and paper industry, that separates out the cellulose, or digested feed. The cellulose is released as a fine, mulchlike product that will someday be used as fuel. For now, it is converted to bedding for Kreider's cows.

It is almost odor-free.

The remaining waste goes to the big outdoor lagoon - but doesn't just sit there. Billions of bacteria work to stabilize the nutrients so that when nitrogen is released, it is in a harmless form. Then the waste heads to a centrifuge, where the concentrated biomatter is extracted.

The end result? A fertilizer that has far less potentially damaging nitrogen.

"Before, when the waste sat in the lagoon, half of the nitrogen escaped into the environment before it was applied to the land," said Jeremy Rowland, Bion's chief operating officer. "In a concentrated form it reduces the amount of commercial fertilizer needed, and there's a lot less nitrogen in waterways."