Karen, since the business of manure is not necessarily familiar to many of our readers, can you first introduce us to the manure-treatment technology?
That is right, not many people are familiar with how much manure is created by global livestock. Also, many people do not realize how important manure is for our global ecosystem. Manure actually contains all fourteen nutrients required for crop growth, which makes it an excellent nature-based solution for soil health. This is something that should become general knowledge.
Livestock in any farm produces manure every day. We work mainly with dairy farms, which produce manure continuously. What normally happens is that the barn is flushed with water to make it nice and clean for the animals to live in. This wastewater liquid is then pushed into a lagoon, containing 95% water and only 5% manure particles. If we look at a farm that has 2500 cows it produces as much wastewater as a city with over 400,000 people. This makes it important to recover that water and the nutrients inside it. Our manure-treatment solution, called is really an enablement technology for resource recovery from food production and livestock waste. The resources we pull out from the wastewater are nutrients, carbon, and clean water.
Can you tell us more about the two Livestock Water Recycling platforms offered to farmers? What are its concrete benefits?
We provide a farm with two platforms. There is our First Wave technology that pulls out 99% of the wastewater, where we have all the macronutrients, including phosphorous and carbon. Here we do particle separation, and we get excellent recovery of solids. That means that we can take all of that solid, which can then be used either for renewable natural gas production, or for soil enhancement and soil sequestration. In this way, the farm can get carbon credits for methane avoidance. We go one way or the other with this first system: either into natural gas, or into the soil. Some farms use it as a soil enhancer or fertilizer, some farms sell it on the retail market. You see how this is really a multi-value proposition.
Then comes the second platform, PLANT, via which we take out another liquid fertilizer that this time contains micronutrients, like potassium and nitrogen. This liquid fertilizer has no solid in it, so it is easily spread through drip irrigation. Finally, at the back-end of PLANT we get potable water.
You are based in Alberta, but you engage with farmers across the globe. Tell us more about this
We have a farm facility in Lebanon, where we are working to protect the Litani River right next to a dairy farm (the Litani River has essential significance in the national economy. It contributes to the water needs of more than one million people living within the basin). And they are using our system to create clean water and to regenerate the soil there and grow crops. We also work in the UK with manure combined with food waste, where we also help retain clear water and make it available for irrigation and flushing. We also have dealers in Portugal and Spain. And we are working in Japan, which will be our first demonstration into the Asian market. Our future growth is planned there. Finally, we are working with a dealership in Australia. But currently, the majority of our equipment is in twelve states across the USA.
What are the main challenges your company is facing presently?
Recycling waste into value is a new industry, for both companies and communities. We are going through regulatory learning, as we complete new projects. We are also learning how to improve our economics.
I should add that the validation for carbon credits took us two years to get. It was a large challenge to get all that data in our system. We just passed two million data points collected on all our equipment. We see that as we get more and more data, we overcome the challenge of the regulatory pressures, since we can show what is being accomplished on every leg of that system. So having all that data available is what allowed us to get carbon validation in the USA. This led us to be the first system to have established the methane-avoidance protocol for manure treatment.
Do you process all that data on your own or do you work with partners?
We collaborated with Google accelerator to help bring our system online and work with our programming team to establish all of our sensor data and put it into our cloud-based acquisition. And then we developed an AI that has gone through the data to make sure we are optimized in every location, and which interprets that data and gives us a lot of background information about manure. I am proud to say that we are the only company collecting and analyzing large volumes of manure treatment data.
What message would you like to send to our readership and to everyone who will be at COP 28 in Dubai?
I was at COP 27 and I want to keep spreading a message of inspiration. We are working very diligently to take all manure and food waste away from traditional lagoon storage, and move towards high-tech, AI-enabled, processing of these liquids resulting in lagoon-free food production and allowing waste to reach its highest index value.
