Farmscape for November 25, 2005  (Episode 1978)

Research conducted at the Prairie Swine Centre has shown spraying clean water has great potential as a means of reducing hydrogen sulphide concentrations in swine barns.

Hydrogen sulphide is a potentially deadly gas which is produced as a by-product during the anaerobic breakdown of manure.

As part of a multi faceted ongoing effort to develop cost effective measures for ensuring H2S concentrations do not reach hazardous levels in swine barns, scientists at the Prairie Swine Centre have completed a bench scale study which compared a variety of treatments using sprayed water.

Research Scientist in Engineering Dr. Bernardo Predicala says treatments using pure clean water and water treated with various levels of an additive believed capable of scrubbing H2S from the air were compared to an untreated check.

Clip-Dr. Bernardo Predicala-Prairie Swine Centre 

We have a setup where in we have manure in an enclosed chamber, a container, and then we have a set of sprayers.

After we agitate the manure to release the H2S then we spray the water and then we check the levels of H2S inside that container.

Spraying water only caused an initial spike of H2S levels at the start of the spray application but this was quickly followed by a faster decline in H2S levels.

After ten minutes the H2S levels in the barrels sprayed with water was down to about 85 percent of initial readings.

The additive itself had no observable positive effect on the H2S concentrations.

In fact, in some tests, it increased the H2S levels so water spraying has the best potential to reduce H2S release from agitated manure but further work is needed to optimize this technique.

Dr. Predicala says the next step will be to repeat the study in actual manure pits to see how effective the approach will be under commercial conditions.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council