ABSTRACT
Composted livestock manure is a popular approach for reducing the amount of material required for land spreading, providing weed seed and pathogen control, developing a product that is easy to spread uniformly, and developing a product that can be sold separately. The treatment system adopted to handle manure, either composted or applied fresh, impacts the energy and nutrient efciency of the system. Little information is available that outlines differences in time and energy required to treat manure via composting vs. handling and land applying it without treatment. This chapter provides a review of the composting process and an energy budget of the composting process. Data from this study was obtained from a 2 year case study that was conducted in Central North Dakota. In this pilot study, producers were paid an incentive to adopt composting. Data was collected on various parameters, including volume reduction of the manure and time spent making the compost. Based on data collected from the case studies, the energy requirement for the fresh manure relative to the composted manure was 1.56:1.00. This analysis does not consider N that may have been lost during the composting process.
