AN ECO-FURNACE FOR WARMING POULTRY HOUSES USING AGRICULTURAL RESIDUES

Abstract

A study was conducted for two main objectives, the first one is to dispose the agricultural wastes in a simple way by burning them in a system contain an eco-furnace, the second objective is to test the possibility of using the previous system to dispose the wastes for warming poultry houses. Temperature drop inside the poultry houses especially in the winter months leads to lower the growth rate of poultry in addition to detrimental effect on feed conversion and poultry flock performance. On the other hand there is no doubt that the use of electricity or butane gas for heating farms especially in developing countries leads to increased production costs resulting in an increase in the price of the commodity marketing. This study was carried out to evaluate and analyze the effects of eco-furnace on warming poultry houses. In Egypt, storage of corn stalks and rice straw bundles present serious fire hazards and environmental pollution when farmers burn it to save time for preparing the land for the next crop. The major benefits of burning poultry litter, that all of the phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and other valuable micro-elements in the litter would be captured in the ash, in addition to dispose toxic and harmful elements as microbes and viruses by burning. Preliminary experiments were conducted in order to select the most efficient eco-filter liquid in reserving exhaust ash and experimentation has been conducted on three different types of liquids (water, water with solved lime, oil). Four types of residues materials (rice straw, corn stalks, cotton stalks and poultry litter); and three poultry house warming systems (eco-furnace, butane gas, and electricity) were taken as treatments in this study. The measurements included filtration liquid efficiency (%), poultry body weight (kg/bird), poultry mortality (%) and costs of poultry house warming process. The best filtration liquid was water with solved lime with efficiencies as follow 13, 11, 16 and 19 % for rice straw, corn stalks, cotton stalks and poultry litter, respectively. The mean body weight increased from 1.23 to 1.58 kg/bird at age of 35 day when using the eco-furnace system. The mortality decreased from 5.2, 3.7, 2.8, 5.6 and 6.4 % to 3.9, 1.6, 1.3, 2.2 and 2.4 % at ages of 1 wk, 2 wk, 3wk, 4wk and 5 wk, respectively when using the eco-furnace. The eco-furnace saved about 63 and 86% of the energy cost compared with the conventional systems of butane gas and electricity. So, conserving rice straw, corn stalks, cotton stalks and poultry litter to energy can solve serious environmental polution and providing millions of pounds in energy savings to poultry producers each year.