Abstract
Intensive livestock production has a negative environmental impact by producing large amounts of animal dejections, which, if not properly managed, can contaminate nearby water bodies with nutrient excess. However, if the animal manure could be transferred efficiently to nearby crops and used as a fertilizer for the plants, pollution/contamination would be mitigated, transforming manure from a waste to a resource. This valorization of manure from waste to a resource falls within the circular economy principles, but the transportation of manure also comes at an environmental and economic cost. It is a single-objective optimization problem regarding finding the best solution for the logistics process of satisfying nutrient crops needs through livestock manure. This paper uses a centralized optimal algorithm (COA) to solve the problem, based on a realistic simulator that considers numerous real-world constraints that related work has not yet addressed. Implementation and evaluation of this method have been carried out based on extensive geolocalized data from Catalonia (Spain), one of the densest European farming regions, as a case study. The findings show that the use of treatment units in pig farms is not profitable, while applying treatment units on selected cow farms for composting manure has its merits, under an intelligent choice of cow farms. Finally, a comparison of our findings with those of two similar studies in Hangzhou, China and Minnesota, USA, are performed.
Highlights
The central role of the agricultural sector is to provide adequate and high-quality food to an increasing human population, which is expected to be increased by more than 30% by 2050 Food and Agriculture of the United Nations (2009)
Our contribution in this paper is twofold: on the one hand, we have developed a regional data-based methodology for finding solutions to transferring animal manure to be used as organic fertilizer in crop fields in an optimal way, taking into account current policy restrictions
We argue that the scenario treatment_cows_smart is suitable for a real-world policy because it reduces the cost of installation of treatment units in cow farms dramatically, while it maintains a very high score of the GO, maximizing the utilization of animal manure as nitrogen
Summary
The central role of the agricultural sector is to provide adequate and high-quality food to an increasing human population, which is expected to be increased by more than 30% by 2050 Food and Agriculture of the United Nations (2009). If handled and distributed correctly, manure can be applied as organic fertilizer in crop fields that produce different types of fruits and cereals, nuts and vegetables, saving substantial amounts of chemical fertilizers that come at a high economic and environmental cost (Sanford et al, 2009; Bayu et al, 2005) In this way, the potential contamination of air, soil and water created by animal manure could be mitigated (He and Shi, 1998; Teira-Esmatges and Flotats, 2003; Paudel et al, 2009), while a positive effect on soil organic matter and microbiota is possible (Whalen et al, 2000; Almeida et al, 2019)
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