STREUBEL: My research focused on helping out our local farmers, especially our local dairymen on what we could do to help them take care of some of their nutrient loading that they have with their dairy manure and maybe create a product for them to sell off-site. And so we looked at using the fiber from the dairy manure turning it into a biochar and then putting it into dairy lagoons to kind of absorb/recover phosphorus from those lagoons, lowering the phosphorus levels so that it could go back out onto the field in a normal process but with a lower phosphorus load

Results have been promising in lowering the phosphorus levels in the lagoons.

And we are also then taking that material and seeing if it’s useful to the plant and that the phosphorus that’s being trapped truly is in plant available form. And our results seem to indicate that when you add our biochar into the dairy lagoons we can lower phosphorus and it looks like it can be an adequate fertilizer source. They would be able to reduce their phosphorus loads on their land, in their lagoons and possibly have a co-product to sell off-site to people who do need phosphorus in a form that is carbon rich and plant available. AG Info