Agriculture, pastures and garden composting construction with high-quality fertilizers and locally available waste streams, including animal manure. That is the starting point of the vision on cycle agriculture. This is the objective of the feed-manure-cycle in Netherlands.
To achieve this, it is crucial to use minerals from manure well and, where possible, to recover them. Reducing emissions is an important aspect here.
A mineral that is already recovered from sewage water is phosphate. Phosphate binds with magnesium to the mineral magnesium ammonium phosphate, or struvite. Following the same principle, phosphate is also bound in manure. By forming struvite in manure, ammonium is also bound, so that it is released to a lesser extent into the air during storage in the manure pit or during spreading. Emission reduction at the farm is possible in this way.
Struvite is a slow-acting fertilizer. This means that phosphate and nitrogen in the soil are slowly released again, so that there is less loss due to leaching. In this way, magnesium contributes to reducing emissions from manure and a better valuation of important minerals.
- Lower emissions through binding of struvite;
- Less leaching of minerals.