New Emerging Technology For Production Of A Sterile Blood Based Fertilizer

The much debated issue of slaughterhouse blood disposal is one that is all too familiar at abattoirs and water utilities alike. Bovine blood used to be one of the hottest commodities that an abattoir had to sell. Bovine blood is rich in protein, and was the preferred source of protein in animal feed mixtures until mad cow disease reared is ugly head back in the 90’s.

As more and more countries started banning the use of bovine blood in feed mixtures, a rapidly declining market turned what was once a very sought after product into one of the biggest headaches for abattoir owners and water treatment plants.

How and why did this happen, and more importantly, what can be done to solve this ever increasing problem?

Blood has a few unique characteristics that make it a very difficult product to dispose of safely and effectively.

Let’s quickly look at just a few of these:

• Bovine Blood is considered to be a condemned product in many countries and as such cannot enter the food chain in any form.
• Untreated blood could carry a whole range of pathogens that can potentially infect humans or animals.
• Raw blood has the tendency to coagulate very rapidly, and as such does not remain liquid for long. This is really problematic insofar as storage and pumping goes. Citric acid is commonly used to prevent coagulation to a certain extent.
• Untreated blood goes off very quickly and anyone will tell you that putrefying blood is quite possibly the worst smelling thing you can ever imagine! Sodium metabisulfite is commercially used to temporarily suppress the smell in storage tanks.
• Due to blood’s inherently high protein content, blood in any natural form is the perfect breeding ground for most living microorganism. Bacterial populations can swiftly reach mind boggling proportions – hence blood’s propensity to go off so quickly. Even in its dried form (blood meal) it is still very prone to contamination.

The physical and chemical properties of blood that make it the perfect addition to animal feeds are also the very properties that make it such an awful product to dispose of.

In South Africa bovine blood is typically disposed of by flushing it into the sewage system. This creates serious downstream problems for the water utilities, as the nutrient load of the blood often overwhelms the capabilities of their anaerobic digestors and water purifiers thus resulting in higher than permitted BOD, COD and nutrient loading in their discharged water stream. This by default causes enormous environmental impacts and is undesirable in the extreme.

The one application of blood that remains an option – provided that pathogen control can be achieved – is to use it as a fertilizer. Blood is one of the richest natural sources of Nitrogen and has a rapid nutrient release profile similar to high nitrogen chemical fertilizers.

The main hurdle that limits the use of blood as a nitrogen based fertilizer is simply that raw blood is difficult to work with. Coagulation, odors and pathogen loading are all issues which are costly to address when utilizing standard technology.

A simple calculation will tell you that 16 liters of blood contain equivalent quantities of Nitrogen than one kilogram of Urea. In normal agricultural settings, the application of 5000 liters of blood per hectare will supply enough Nitrogen to feed most commercial crops for an entire season!

If one looks at the besieged agricultural industry in South Africa today, one can only but feel sorry for the brave farmers that are struggling to produce crops without having the financial means to buy adequate quantities of fertilizer when at the same time thousands and thousands of tons of valuable Nitrogen gets flushed down the drain just to become a costly and environmental headache for someone else.

There is however a new technology emerging that can very easily solve all of this at a fraction of the traditional cost …

The flask in the photo above contains a blood based liquid fertilizer that is sterile, safe and extremely economical to produce in even the most rural settings.

If you are interested in learning more about this exiting product or process, please contact us for more information.