Characterising the volumes and chemical characteristics of dairy sheep effluent in New Zealand
2018
Smith, L. C. | Longhurst, R. D. | Monaghan, R. M. | Bartlett, N.
Dairy sheep produce an effluent stream from the milking parlour that is either applied directly to land via a sump and spray irrigator, or is stored in an effluent pond before application. In order to characterise this effluent stream, a monitoring programme was undertaken with effluent samples collected from two case study sheep milking farms over two lactation seasons (2014/2015 and 2015/2016), and a third over one lactation period (2015/2016). Typical effluent volumes generated ranged between 4 and 10 L ewe⁻¹ day⁻¹ for the 130–200-day lactation. The mean physical and chemical attributes of effluent samples generated by the milking parlours were: 0.54% dry matter (DM), 220 g nitrogen (N) m⁻³, 32 g phosphorus (P) m⁻³, 150 g potassium (K) m⁻³ and 22 g sulphur (S) m⁻³. The mean nutrient concentrations of dairy sheep effluent are lower than values reported for dairy goat (P & S only) and dairy cow effluents (N, P, K and S).
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