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well thank you and it is a pleasure and honor for me to be here I have been involved in this topic for the past two decades it is a very controversial topic I was very impressed with the questions that caromed forwarded to me that you had put forth and we're going to talk about some of those a little bit and my preference and given a presentation is for it to be very informal and if it's okay with these two people here if there are questions as we go along please feel free to interrupt me and we'll have a discussion I actually prefer that type of format I have not been to Yale before but one thing that I see is that students don't sit in the front just like they don't set it in front at NC State where I teach so I'm used to that I'm going to talk about several topics this afternoon primarily related to the issues surrounding animal production agriculture I know that the topic in your module is beef I have very little experience with beef but I will tell you that the issues related to the environmental component are almost the same and I'm going to talk about that a little bit I have a lot of colleagues at other institutions that have spent their career on waste management issues related to beat production especially colleagues at Texas A&M and and parts of the Midwest but again the the societal and the environmental the sustained sustainability issues are the same and I hope that I can make that point with you this afternoon one thing that I want to start is making a distinction between animal feeding operations and concentrated animal feeding operations you see this misrepresented repeatedly and actually the peer-reviewed scientific literature and I kind of hate to admit it but I am a co-author on a paper now with some people that Duke University where we have looked at the impact of estrogens from livestock operations on the environment fate and transport and the facility that we use is clearly an animal feeding operation it is not a concentrated animal feeding operation but my colleagues on that paper are insisting that we continue to keep the term CAFO in the paper because that is what everyone identifies with but I want you to be aware of the distinction and this is an EPA rules animal feeding operations are operations where the animals are kept and raised in confined situations feed is brought in to the animals rather than the animals grazing or consume and feed that has grown in that area and jumping ahead a little bit and and this is an area and I told Carol make when she contacted me about this several months ago that I'm someone that gets yelled at by both sides I get yelled at a lot by the environmentalists I get yelled at a lot by the industry and I think you'll see why that's apparent as we go through the presentation and as long as I'm being yelled at by both sides I'm okay with that but from a sustainable issue which one component of what you're talking about in this course a lot of the animal feeding operations and concentrated animal feeding operations bring the free feed in from outside and the meat product goes to the consumer often outside of that area most often outside of that area in North Carolina the East Coast Cardiff is the Northeast Corridor is a big customer based area for the meat that is produced in North Carolina but with the feed coming in to North Carolina and the waste products staying close to where the animals are produced that is not a sustainable situation so just jumping ahead a little bit feed is brought in and by definition an animal feeding operation is under that environmental condition for a total of 45 days or more in any 12-month period it is not the calendar year there's a consecutive 12-month period and crops vegetation forage growth or post harvest residues are not maintained in that area that is an animal feeding operation now EPA identifies a concentrated animal feeding operation is one in which essentially has these numbers for these animal sectors and for your group you are interested in cattle so anything that would be a thousand head or more would be a concentrated animal feeding operation if it is indeed and trust me it will be a CAFO but it first has to be rather than a fill it first has to be an AFO before it can be a CAFO now what you will see and this is the case what whatever what whatever it is within that permitted unit okay so it would be within a unit that would that would have the permit so what you will often see and where we were doing the estrogen study it was on a swine operation and and this is not uncommon you will see a lot of these animal units that will have just below this threshold this is where it will be designed for and this will be the number that was maintained on ours with the with the swine operation I think the facility that we did the study they were permitted for 2,400 animals and I think you can understand the logic of that they don't want to be characterized into that CAFO because more so in the past than now although this can always change the regulations if you are a CAFO are significantly different or can be significantly different as compared to an a fund now and one time EPA intended for all of these operations that were would be in this category to be required to have an NPDES permit that is that has gone through the court system repeatedly over the past decade EPA has been sued by both the industry as well as the environmental groups on that topic currently there is no requirement to have an NPDES permit even if you have this number of animals or more unless you are found to be discharging to surface waters of that state and that is a violation of the Clean Water Act and they have been back and forth about this and but that's where it currently stands now you do not have to have NPDES unless you're discharged if you're found to be discharging yes they're going to put you under the requirement of having that permit and that's where the medium and small k flows come into characterization these units do not require even under the earlier laws where EPA wanted everyone to have an NPDES that would be in this category these are not required to have that but they would be if they were found to be in violation relative to discharge of animal waste residues to surface waters so you you are a small CAFO and you get a call from MPD from EPA that you are required to do an NPDES because you have been found to be in violation that is a very very bad day for you so that's we could talk I teach three lectures on these regulations in a course that I teach every fall and it's very complex but I want you to be aware of these differences and the basis of why so hopes before I go to that did they have the slides in advance okay so when I'm on an airplane and the person next to you you says okay what do you do and I tell them the tight work I do and then I start they say well what does that involve and I start talking about some of these numbers most of the people in society are just absolutely flabbergasted by these numbers so if I ask you on a day-to-day basis in the u.s. how many head of cattle your unit is cattle are on the ground in the u.s. approximately anyone else he got it almost exactly right it's about 100 million what about swine anyone want to put forth a guess day to day inventory swine we have 10 million now 50 you got the first one right what do you think was swine you're right again you're right again so a hundred approximately 100 day-to-day inventory let's talk about poultry a little bit me type chickens how many 100 million we have and this is this would be I want to go back a little bit before the meat type chickens let's do the number that are produced annually in the US that are put into the cellophane in the market and go to the the the KFC's and that those type places how many per year in the US only 800 got a billion anyone else I've heard a billion as the highest it's about eight point five billion table eggs table eggs that we have i I had a couple boiled eggs for breakfast this morning how many table eggs per year how many 80 billion so 80 billion and this is only in the u.s. this is only in the u.s. yeah and I want to make clearly the young man was correct on the day-to-day inventory on cattle but these are actual production this is this would be approximately slaughter number and I actually think this number is a little bit low but I got this from the American Meat Institute and they're usually pretty spot-on with with their numbers they're pretty objective we see little over 100 million hogs eight point five billion head of chickens eighty billion eggs if you consider the economics and you have yes question that's correct that that is correct good point and I also didn't put turkeys in this this slide as well we grow a lot of turkeys in North Carolina but if you look at all livestock and poultry in the the dairy and the turkeys and the ones that I don't have here the that industry employs about 6 million people in the US and is responsible for about 900 billion annually to the US economy that's the high percent of the the GU the profit gross national product now but I want you to make sure that you understand this is all of the allied industries this is from the farm gate and allied industries that get the products into the consumer market so it's the big industry question back to the early if you just look at this block here is this an animal feeding operation if you just look at that the visual there is that an animal feeding operation well the the cover crop is being pretty well maintained so this actually would not be if you just look at this photo that would not be an AFO oh yeah absolutely absolutely and they probably are it especially was in this photo how about this absolutely so the state that I'm from yes sir I I don't have that in the presentation today but I have seen that data that data is available oh there's no question about that oh okay now and now I better understand your question and I will go into this a little bit later because I know the multiplier because I I'm not an economist but I work with a lot of economists so in North Carolina the state that I'm from North Carolina is often referred to as a number one meat producing state in the nation and I'm not sure if that's true or not but we we certainly produce a lot of livestock and poultry in North Carolina about 800 million chickens 35 million turkeys 3.1 billion table legs and 18 million hogs per year the day-to-day inventory of hogs in North Carolina is about 10 million thus more we don't have that many people in North Carolina it it would for the industry it would be for the breeder flocks and those numbers are tremendous as well good question so what is length define that a beef of swine eating chicken are needed to grow because you said that there's only if you look at the day-to-day inventory if it's just less than double for that and and for chickens it's every six to seven weeks right because you've got to maintain those flocks so this is where we look at the the economic aspect a little more specifically for a specific case in North Carolina and this will answer the the prior question to some degree the farm gate income for all agricultural commodities livestock poultry crop greenhouse including tobacco at one time tobacco was a big industry in North Carolina it is not such a big industry now but livestock and poultry represent approximately 65% of the total agricultural economy in the state so 65% of this total value of farm gate value is going to be from animal production agriculture now the economists tell me and this this would be the revenue that would go to the producers The Economist's tell me that you can conservatively multiply farm gate by a factor of four to five to get the total economic impact of getting the product to the consumer now an interesting situation and this relates to sustainability it relates to I think the topic of your course if you look at what has occurred in North Carolina in 1991 the day-to-day inventory was about three million pigs on the ground and then that rapidly grew over a period of just five to six years to a day-to-day inventory of approximately ten million and it has plateaued since then because of policy that was implemented in the state of North Carolina which put a moratorium on expanding that industry and the moratorium was based on environmental concerns and exceptions to the moratorium require that remediation technologies be implemented that address specific environmental parameters and we will be talking specifically about that because I've spent a lot of time in the past two decades on that specific topic and again the technologies overlap to poultry beef dairy they overlap and we'll talk about that had a question here it does not it does not that's an interesting question because the political makeup of our legislature in North Carolina has changed significantly in the last two years are you told me you're from Western Salem right so you probably know a little bit about this and they're actually there have been some discussions in some stakeholder groups that the law that was implemented here could possibly be repealed so that would be an expiration but but it doesn't have the only restrictions the only criteria associated with the moratorium now is that you have to have a technology that meets the criteria that are defined which we will talk about and if I'd had a little more time I would see if I could have found you the numbers for beef on this but I want to put this graphic up because of the work that we have done in North Carolina related to the technology development there has been a lot of interest directed towards our initiative from all over the globe and you if you look at us compared to pork or poultry to other parts of the world China in particular you can understand that there is a lot of growth and there is a lot of desire to grow and a lot of parts of the world have the same or they should have the same environmental issues that we have here and we have repeatedly then had collaborations with people in China Asia Australia Europe to some degree but that's the the dynamics in Europe is a little bit different related to animal production agriculture and policy than these other parts of the world so I wanted to point that out because there's interest in what we're doing relative to technology implementation in other parts of the world that in China for example they currently are producing half the pigs that are grown in the world and they want to increase that number dramatically and and they are having environmental issues and one thing one point that I want to make with you is that and this isn't one of the areas that I have gotten yelled at by some of the stakeholders you really need to think about sustainability in multiple generations I think you need to think about it as a minimum five generations from now not next year or next decade or next generation but multiple generations in advance and you have to consider it from a global perspective I tell my students that on the and I'm from a conservative state and and this is one area another area that I have been yelled at about but on the global warming issue it's not a question of whether it's real it's a question of whether we're going to do something about it or we're gonna learn to live with the consequences and if your policy is to move animal production agriculture from one part of the world to another just because of differing environmental regulations that make it easier to grow the animals there that is not a good idea that's that's true now I don't know the percent of that but there are American companies that have a significant presence in China not to my knowledge and and this is where we start to talk about the environmental sustainability issues and and this would be true for poultry beef dairy the example here is swine if you look at what has happened in North Carolina I showed you these numbers earlier in 1991 we had you know about two and a half to three million pigs on the ground and buy and now it's ten million in 1970 the actual number of farms was twenty thousand and now the actual number of farms on the ground in North Carolina are two thousand and you see this trend worldwide for all of the livestock and poultry production commodities larger operations fewer farms more concentrated production it is happening worldwide we can discuss and we can debate whether that is good or not if your objective is to grow the product as cost efficient as possible and also as nutritionally productive as possible and also as pathogen reduced as possible the concentrated animal production model if you look at this objectively often is the much better model as compared to the smaller facilities and I'll I'm teaching a course this semester an honors course and the topic is surrounding the controversial use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics in animal production agriculture and one of my invited speakers who was not a veterinarian for a company but he was an academic veterinarian he made the comment that he will not purchase pork that is from certain chains because they are only getting local grown free-range animals and he said there started we are now starting to see trichinosis in those populations again and so there it is it is an issue it is a consideration that you need to think about and I understand that it is very very controversial now this is the slide that I want to make some comparisons related to your topic I've incorporated several visuals of cattle and dairy feed Lots here visual one two four and five are all with that commodity and this visual is one of the forms that we use as a control site with our technology performance verification work and this is a compost facility that is a technology application and I want to make the distinction there that you have two considerations with all of these commodities is some liquid waste stream and a solid waste stream and the way that you treat them from a technology perspective would be different in most cases well the dairy and cattle operations this is a holding retention runoff retention facility associated with a cattle feedlot so when you see these and these and these you are going to have these associated with it and you're going to also in most environments be collecting the solids from the waste from the dairy operations and the cattle operations that could then be further processed and a composting or other type of treatment for solids application I'm not a big fan of composting it it is it's okay there are some benefits you will kill the pathogens as you're going to hear me talk about a little bit later I've got a real issue with ammonia emissions and composting operations you're definitely going to be losing ammonia from composting operations but in these types of environments with the animals and the the the waste that is being produced and the way that the waste is being held the slurry being held in these open environments whether it is this type of retention pond with a cattle operation or a so-called Lagoon with a a swine operation this this is a swine operation in North Carolina from the actual surfaces and especially if you get some so when current across the surface of this this Lagoon or this holding area and especially from within the buildings you are losing tremendous amounts of ammonia we are losing metric tons of ammonia from these livestock and poultry operations and I'm going to tell you a little bit later why I think that is such a big issue I think it is one of the main contributing issues to why these types of systems are not generationally sustainable it's the ammonia emissions it is that is the big issue so let's talk about some of the specific environmental parameters that are not just North Carolina but nationally that are either being regulated or our emerging issues or are being impacted by policy first are nutrients and what I have done here is put in the put in red some of the parameters that are in my view emerging issues of importance you're starting to hear a lot more about it even with the political climate that we have now in Washington and in some of the states surprisingly there's only one parameter on this slide that represents the majority of regulatory requirement for livestock and poultry production in the US and to a large degree of the world it's the only one of them what do you think it is no EPA doesn't even regulate owner it's the most probably the most controversial one but from a regular if I am a produced that it's producing these millions and billions of animals I have to go out and get I'm an a foe and I have to go out and get from my state or from EPA a permit which one of these do you think drives that drink its nutrients and which one of those nutrients do you think it is it's nitrogen its nitrogen most of the permit requirements are going to be based on land application of nitrogen from the animal waste that would be based on the ability of the receiving crop to assimilate that nitrogen so it could be an advantage to a producer to be volatilizing a lot of ammonia before it gets to the crop area the field that you're going to apply for crop if you are laying limited that's an issue in some cases it will be nitrogen and phosphorus but because of the phosphorus content and because the majority of the regulations are based on nitrogen and this would be true for cattle you will be accumulating phosphorus in high concentrations in that land area where you are applying that waste and this is the second reason that I think the current systems are not generationally sustainable because at one time we did not think that phosphorus transported readily but phosphorus under certain soil type conditions and under certain concentrations can transport very readily not as readily as nitrogen but we'll transport and it will transport laterally and we'll get into surface waters and it will cause you trophic ation most streams relative to eutrophication are going to be more sensitive to phosphorous than they are nitrogen so that's that's an issue metals copper and zinc when you add higher than the nutritional requirement of these two metals to livestock and poultry you will increase feed conversion rate and with it especially with the current grain prices that is an economically favorable equation because these are inexpensive nutrients but they're going to accumulate they're going to be excreted by the animal and they're going to be land applied along with the nitrogen and like phosphorous even more so than phosphorus they're not going to transport out of that land area and in certain concentrations if it builds up to certain concentrations were certain soil types and certain receiving crops it can become toxic to the crop and once you have heavy metal toxicity that is very very difficult to remediate it takes a long long time arsenic I have in the red because that's that's an emergent issue that's actually an issue this just kind of been addressed our arsenic is a component of some of the antimicrobial pharmaceuticals that have been used in the poultry industry these pharmaceuticals are a very very effective coccidia stat however because of the build-up of the arsenic the the company that was producing this pharmaceutical was purchased by Pfizer and Pfizer in my view did not want the the public bad publicity that would come with that so they have mandated to be taken off the market so you can no longer use that compound in the poultry industry pathogenic bacteria big topic emerging topic is antibiotic resistance because with a lot of these industries there are considerable amounts of sub-therapeutic antibiotics being used being added to the feed because again in the literature is very clear on this from a nutritional perspective you will get a very significant improved feed conversion rate by adding sub-therapeutic antibiotics to the feed or the war and then the question becomes what impact is that having on antibiotic resistance development of antibiotic resistant bacteria that may then get into the population and impact human health and I've have participated in some epidemiology studies and I can tell you this if you go sample these animal feeding operations the those facilities like I showed you in the earlier slide with the cattle and the poultry in this one you will find antibiotic resistant bacteria there and you will find the the antibiotics there as well there will be they will be there in the actual wastes excreta and part per million concentrations if you sample the surface waters around those areas or the shallow aquifer you will find them in part per trillion concentrations so then the question becomes how much of a risk is that because one of the speakers that I had to this class that I'm teaching this semester they showed a very detailed lifecycle analysis that showed the impact of adding the very low concentrations of antibiotic to the feet relative to the reduced amount of corn crop you would need to raise soybean crop you would need to raise diesel fuels needed for transport it was very very significant so then you have to look at what other risk versus the benefits because the risk are not zero I think if you look at it objectively relative in the epidemiology studies that I have been involved with with scientists from UNC School of Public Health Duke University Wake Forest med school we just didn't see the the phenotype of the antibiotic resistant that was on the farm getting into the gut of the workers or the people living on the farms but the risk is not zero the risk is not zero ammonia emissions let me talk about ammonia emissions I've made the case that we're losing a lot of ammonia from these operations why is it so was it significant relative to sustainability we did as part of our study with looking at these various technologies of cost-benefit analysis because the question come always comes up or should come up about the externality cost associated with livestock production again this is true with cattle this is especially true with cattle there's a lot of ammonia loss from these cattle feedlots and the surprising thing that I learned in the cost-benefit analysis was that when we compared when we monetized the cost to society of nutrients metals pathogenic bacteria odor and ammonia ammonia trumped the other four by eighty fold and the reason for that is because ammonia in the atmosphere as I'm sure several of you know will react with acidic compounds and be converted to fine particle particulates and if they are can if it's converted to fine particle particulate then when we respire it there are health consequences and the objective determination of the cost of that is very significant so that's why and one of you actually asked this question it was a great question that's that very question if you're looking at these different criteria which one is the most important relative to which technology do you choose so I always feel you have to put top priority for that reason on reducing ammonia emissions there's also the there's the that they're the rules and regulations at the state in the federal level but then there's public perception and I can tell you that public perception is really driving practices in livestock and poultry production now I had a meeting I spent a lot of time with the corporate people in these industries I spend a lot of time with environmental groups and the community groups but I was in a meeting a couple of months ago where one of the corporate managers of a major animal food production industry made the comment to me that you said you know we're not so much worried about EPA anymore the new EPA is wal-mart and McDonald's into Polti and I found this one because I knew that you had a Chipotle exercise with with one of your classes and again is that good or bad I can tell you that it is having an impact it's having an impact on the these animals are produced and it has having an impact much more significant than anything that I have seen from a public policy regulatory and rulemaking process in the last two decades so again in North Carolina when the moratorium was implemented this is what the legislature put in place they said if you want to expand you must sing you must eliminate the discharge of nutrients nitrogen phosphorus to surface and ground work for the other for the North Carolina legislature said you must significantly reduce each of these so what has significantly reduced me and I think this is an example of how public policy plays out an interesting way because then when we went to the technology process development the Attorney General's Office said well the North Carolina legislature has already enacted what the environmental parameters are that's not a negotiable item so in the process of looking at these technologies we had to quantify what significantly reduce means and then once we did that it got incorporated in a subsequent legislative session and we went through the Environmental Management Commission and was codified into law so now we know exactly how many kilograms of ammonia we have to reduce we know exactly what the outer reductions have to be we know exactly how many Logue reductions we have to get with pathogens so I used to be really annoyed when I was involved with this process the technology development process of what we had inherited from the legislative body but then after I went through it I said you know it really is the way that it should work because the elected officials should not have been the ones quantifying those parameters it needed to be people that were made up of public health officials scientists engineers and that's what we did so I think that was a good example one of you asked the question what was the drive in and this was a great question what was the driving force behind that company Smithfield Foods putting up fifteen million dollars to do these technology developments and performance verifications well the Attorney General negotiated that amount with the company and I think is safe to say that if the company had not agreed to do that they're probably at that time would have been a class-action lawsuit of some type that would have been put in place so for the technology getting to the science which takes a lot of resources scientific research is expensive we were provided a good chunk of resources to develop technology and then objectively determine how the technology impacted these environmental parameters and also we were mandated to determine what the cost would be and it took us about five years to do that but we looked at about 15 technologies that we took from start to finish and we developed quantified the performance standards and in these technologies there's a variety of applications from simple to complex anaerobic digestion anaerobic digestion that is done ambient temperature mesophilic temperature of thermophilic temperature low solid concentration high solid concentration nitrification denitrification type systems solid separation systems even constructed wetlands which actually worked pretty well but you you still are losing appreciable ammonia from constructed wetlands one of you indicated that this recept wetland would be a good system to look at because of his simplicity and that's true we found of these systems five that actually met the environmental criteria and we found about four that were on the bubble because the way this was set up it had to meet all five of the environmental criteria if it hit a home run on four and just didn't miss the fifth couldn't count it could not be used to meet the moratorium exception but that recept reciprocating wetland system was low cost and I think with the little value engineer and probably could be made to meet the all five of those criteria so let's let's look at the systems that were shown to meet the environmental standards and this again would apply for cattle co-products or waste products and I used in this visuals such that if you go and look at this report it's easily to find what the the companies that were sponsoring the work for the individual technology developments and this was a peer reviewed process we solicited proposals from academic institutions industry groups technology suppliers and I appointed a scientific review panel and we got about a hundred or so proposals and from those we chose the we chose 18 15 of them were taken to completion and these this was the company named super soils it's been changing out to Tara blue but this is a system in which the liquid slurry so you could take the slurry coming off of those cattle facilities and process it in this system and I'm sure you would get equal results it goes through a polymer solid separation process to drop out the solids to drop out the metals to drop out the phosphorous organic ammonia will stay in solution and then like a small municipality system that ammonia is nitrified that's one reason that's expensive you have to provide energy to do the aeration to get the nitrification then it goes through an anaerobic environment you've got plenty of carbon from the animal waste so you get good denitrification so you're addressing them on your emissions you converting it to nitrogen gas and there's an argument well is that the best thing to do shouldn't we be converting it to something that one could be more readily recycled as a fertilizer instead of putting it back into the atmosphere as nitrogen gas this is a fluidized bed combustion each of these for our technologies that only treat the solid component the fluid I bed combustion process is very similar to the gasification of solids process you can you can get an energy component as part of the process the same way that you get with anaerobic digestion to convert it to methane to convert the carbon to methane this is a high solid anaerobic digester most anaerobic digesters that you read about are gonna be digesters that treat a high liquid concentration in the three to six maybe as high as 12 percent solids range this one would almost treat solids in the same concentration as you would have in a compost in unit and the end product is his methane which can then be combusted and converted into electricity with the generator but that brings us back to another policy issue and this is an area that I've been very disappointed when we were doing this project 2002 2005 I was confident that by now we would have a good carbon credit policy in the US and that we would have good return for green energy that was going back into the grid and it just has not happened in North Carolina we at least did get a renewable energy portfolio standard finally passed in about 2007 and it did have an earmark that a certain component of the Green Energy had to come from livestock but it was very very low and it's also structured such that there the Power Purchase Agreements that the producers have to enter into with the utilities are very restrictive and trust me I have been yelled at a lot by stating that position a lot but it's true and I invite anyone to look at it objectively and I invite anyone to look at what has happened and what's on the ground there very very few of these on the ground in north carolina and this is true nationwide and i get it that this is a more expensive way to generate electricity and the utilities do not want to bear that cost and that bid and impact their shareholders but I also feel that if your objective we look at the impact of the economy to this industry if you want to sustain the industry why would you not provide some incentives that would be beneficial to not only the producers but all of the other people associated with that segment of the economy and it certainly would be good for the environment but I've been very very disappointed in in both the carbon credit policy and the green energy policy directions I think we've got a long ways to go in this country on that getting more into the technical component a little bit I'm going to show you cost and a lot of you with your questions and comments picked up on this this technology and that this is now this is a super soil technology that is now the they've changed their name to Terra blue we are now in a third generation of that technology because it's expensive and our engineers have taken an approach with the company and we've actually got some state support to do this to to try to apply value engineering and get that cost down and we've had some success it's still not where we'd like for it to be but we have brought the costs down but look at this if you think back to that slide seven or nine that I showed you that the lagoons and the cattle Lots this looks very different associated with the animal production units and it is very effective in addressing the environmental parameters that we have targeted this was the generation two that we worked with and I want to show you this one because it gives you a little better perspective of the actual technology and this would be one of about 15 livestock buildings that are on that property and this is a relatively small footprint to treat that waste stream because let's let's play the numbers game again if we go back to let's choose your commodity topic cattle per thousand felled live weight on a daily basis and this does not include any flush water on a daily basis fecal material in urine how many panels are going to be excreted per thousand pound live weight who wants to make a guess daily basis you saw the numbers you saw the inventory we've got we got about a hundred million on the ground per thousand pounds on a daily basis how many pounds of fecal material and urine combined would be generated per cattle thousand pail so we've got 20 pounds you better roll I got to have a number from you you know I'm not sure I can answer that question definitively for cattle I can tell you this the the nutrients that are consumed by cattle the fee conversion is about the worst it is the worst of all the commodities that we've talked about about other nutrients seventy to ninety percent are going to be excreted it's much less in poultry a lot lot less than fish I know I saw that you had aquaculture is one of your topics okay we got 20 pounds in 100 pounds should stop are you a head for for cattle it's going to be it's going to be for beef cattle it's going to be probably about 50 pounds for dairy it's going to be probably closer to 80 to 90 pounds but much higher for dairy so for swine thousand pound yes the the the diet the dietary component your objective with the dairy is to is to generate milk not meat so swine per thousand pounds live weight fecal material in urine no flush work per day anybody want to guess it's interestingly about the same as dairy it's about 90 pounds per day so getting back to the point but we at this particular facility 5600 head average live weight per head is going to be about 150 pounds on a year to base year year-round basis state of state live weight so you can do the math and calculate how many kilograms per day is going to have to go through the system so it's that's a small footprint it's a pretty small footprint and and I have no research dollars or no vested interest with super soils are terribly just an overview of the results and I put the reference in here all of this work that we did we is published its public domain and you can see there it literally is thousands of pages with these various reports and you can see the various materials and methods and the science behind how we derive these numbers but look at these reductions on carbon solid ammonia phosphorus pathogens for log reduction odor compounds almost 100 percent reduction heavy metals almost 100 percent change gears a little bit just just such that I don't come across as promoting the super soils of Terror blue system and this system would also work for cattle it would work for any type of system that you would have a liquid slurry waste coming off from and you definitely have that with cattle this is a system that uses an anaerobic digester that is earthen low cost it's not tank as you saw with some of the previous visuals it's covered to make it an anaerobic system and then once the waste is treated it comes out of the anaerobic digestion unit into this baffled area of this holding pond and then it is processed through these trickling filters which are these and one of the reasons the super soil was so expensive was because of the energy used to nitrified the ammonia what it goes in the system and one thing you will do with anaerobic digestion systems as you will conserve ammonia you're not going to be volatilizing it which is good but you're going to have it at some point that you must treat it or it will volatilize so to the researchers here said okay let's use just a low energy trickling filter with high surface area on beads within the tanks of the nitrifying bacteria and see if we can get night good night efficient they did it worked quite well it just couldn't get it quite to the threshold that we needed to meet the criteria this system met the odor pathogen metals nutrient and met four of the five so it didn't qualify and this is another area on another value engineering area that we're looking at from an R&D perspective we have continued to try to make these trickling filters more efficient and I think we're almost there okay well we'll zip through well zip through the last two or three but also with this system some of the nutrients after it was nitrified was used for vegetable production in these greenhouses I want to show you this because I know I saw that you also had a tomato component and it was it worked quite well work very well we work with the School of Public Health that UNC our big basketball rival to to look at the pathogens and they found that there essentially were no pathogens transmitted to these Tomatoes Mark's opsi who led that study from UNC he said tomatoes that you purchased in the market get but many more pathogens on it from the people that pick them up and put them back down than they were getting from this system I put this fight in because I wanted you to see the beauty of the science I mean this this is a tough issue but science is really exciting it's really exciting and in this system we work with sous chef Minh at Duke University to do the odor modeling and she used an alluring Lagrangian model and actually on each of the farms each of the farm systems that we looked at if you were looking down from above she modeled this such that you were looking at ten meter squares and in each point and this was based on odor panel analysis and samples that were taken she developed this model where y would be the number of odor parcels that were released from a point on that 10 meter square and then you could model the dispersion and X would be the odor panel determination from 0 to 8 zero is no odor hate as extremely offensive odor so and then we looked at it because we had to take into consideration property lines so we looked at it east west north and south so in this model if you look at this this south orientation would be the south orientation of this overhead shot here and this one two three four five six buildings would be the one two three four five six buildings it's all red intense odor inside the building as you would anticipate but then when the wind was coming from that direction you can see how quickly it dispersed by distance and that's pretty good this one actually met the odor standards for the criteria but as it isn't that neat science so again they this technology was one low cost it did really well on everything except ammonia and that's and we're working on that component now and I think again I think we're almost there economic feasibility determination the bullets in black or what we were mandated to do with the Attorney General agreement for all of these technologies and as that essentially is a cost returns analysis the controversial component was what is in blue I agreed that we would do a cost-benefit analysis that was I had no idea how controversial that would be but I stand by it I think you have to do the externality cost to monetize the impact to society and these are the numbers but these are the cost returns numbers we were prevented by the structure of the agreement for putting in the externality cost so you can see with the baseline system is about $90 these economists drive me crazy getting these values down to the penny but you can see the this is generation 1 it was much more expensive the generation 2 they knocked off about $100 on the unit cost and I'm looking at some modified numbers with some assumptions that we think we're going to meet with the third generation and I think we're going to be getting close now per the mandate per the law per the agreement we don't have to get to that but we do have to get it down to about 115 and that's some that's a different discussion because we had to go through the economic feasibility determination and at the end of the day we made a determination that at this cost you can put no more than these many people out of business or reduce the herd size by this value and that value was determined to be 12 percent of the total herd size again that was that was a tough process to work through and believe me not everyone agreed with that 12 percent some thought it should be 50 some thought it should be zero so what have I learned in dealing with this for two decades and and I'm not bragging about this but I have been in some tough situations I have had my life threatened dealing with this topic real threats at the end of the day I think you have to look at the triple bottom line yes these jobs in the economy do matter to these people the cost to society do matter you have to consider the externality cost and of course the environment matters that's where I have gotten in trouble with the industry side it's not sustainable I don't think there is there's some problem areas but I don't think there's real crisis areas right now but if you look at it generationally it is not sustainable and it is gonna be some serious consequences if we don't address it so with that I'll take questions and I think I've been told I have to turn this off now