Environmental impact in using poultry manure as organic fertilizer

Abstract

This paper presents the environmental risk factors and the possible negative impacts on the environment from intensive farming of laying hens in storage conditions and valorization of poultry manure as natural fertilizer. The experiments and the analytical determinations were performed in the second phase of the project with the acronym VITAOU within PN II INNOVATION program, experimenting the first set of four innovative nutritional solutions for laying hens. The environmental risk factors are the existing pollutants in poultry manure: nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, heavy metals and pathogens. The obtained results show that the concentration of these elements in poultry manure is well below the limits imposed by environmental legislation. Therefore the poultry manure may become polluter only when failure to comply the good agricultural practices of fertilization. Comparing the concentration values of the four nutritional solutions with the concentration values obtained for the reference recipe was carried out a ranking of the nutritional solutions in terms of environmental impact in order to choose the best two nutritional solutions based on quality/cost environmental impact performance.