Odour and greenhouse gas emissions from manure spreading

The Canadian livestock industry generates 150 million tonnes of manure annually and the majority of this manure is land applied. This practice allows the manure nutrients to be recycled to the soil crop system while improving soil fertility. However, land application of manure has the potential to negatively impact soil, water, and air quality if not managed properly. Microbial processes transform the manure nutrients into forms that are susceptible to leaching or volatilization. Balancing the nutrient loss dynamics from fertilized soil is very difficult because the nutrient transformations are affected by the soil environment such as air and water content, pH, and labile carbon content. All of these soil environmental factors can be influenced by manure application practices such as application rate, timing, and manure placement. Knowledge of how these management practices affect the soil environment can help producers make management decisions that reduce the likelihood of soil, water, and air contamination from manure application.;Very few data exist on how manure application practices affect odour emissions after spreading. Therefore, the efficiency of subsurface application in reducing odours from manure spreading for both solid and liquid manure was assessed. Flux chambers and dynamic dilution olfactometry were used to measure odour emissions from five livestock manure species applied at three application rates using surface and subsurface application methods. The results indicated that odour concentrations from injected plots were up to 66% (37% on average) lower than concentrations from broadcast applications. Injection seemed to have a larger impact on reducing odours from solid manure than liquid manure, mainly due to efficient manure coverage from solid manure injection.;The odour data collected in this study described how management practices affected odours immediately after spreading. Knowledge of how these practices affect the emission rate trend over time is required to apply dispersion models to optimize the minimum separation distances for manure spreading activities. The model parameters for an existing volatilization model were determined from field and literature data and the resulting model allowed the effects of application mode (surface vs. subsurface) and manure type (liquid vs. solid) on odour emissions for 48 hours after application to be simulated. The effects of injection depth and a coverage factor on emissions were also simulated.;Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural activities such as land application of livestock manure cannot be ignored when assessing overall emissions from anthropogenic sources. Like odour emissions, the magnitude of the GHG emissions will be influenced by management practices such as manure placement during land application. The GHG fluxes resulting from the surface and subsurface application of liquid and solid manure were also compared within 24 hours of application using a static chamber and gas chromatography. The results showed that carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e) fluxes were approximately three times higher from the injected plots than the surface plots for both solid and liquid manure.;While the data from this study showed that manure type and placement influenced short-term nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, manure management practices (particularly slurry injection or solid manure incorporation) have the potential to influence long-term emissions by changing the magnitude and pattern of the nitrogen cycle in the soil-plant system. Management practices also impact the magnitude of other nitrogen losses (ammonia volatilization, nitrate leaching) which affect indirect N2O emissions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).