Dr. Karin Wittenberg – University of Manitoba
The University of Manitoba says a new Agricultural By-Products Processing Research and Demonstration Facility planned for the Glenlea Research Station will provide the infrastructure to turn low-value agricultural by-products into value-added commodities.
Last month representatives of the governments of Canada and Manitoba announced just under one million dollars has been allocated for the construction of an Agricultural By-Products Processing Research and Demonstration Facility.
Construction of the facility, which will be located at the Glenlea Research Station, home to the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment, is set to begin this coming spring.
Dr. Karin Wittenberg, the associate dean research with the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says the facility is designed to allow scientists to take agricultural products such as manure or straw and evaluate processing and handling technologies for those low-value products.
“The new facility is going to add to infrastructure that we already have for manure storage, both liquid and semi-solid and solid manures and it’s going to complement a pilot scale anaerobic digester that we have on location” said Dr. Wittenberg.
“When I say complement, what we are doing is providing capacity to do solid-liquid separation, to compost and to monitor for example greenhouse gas emissions in those processes or to be able to do nutrient balance studies to determine what happens to the nutrients during those processes. The infrastructure is both giving us a place to do these things and the equipment to process and monitor the effects of processing.”
Dr. Wittenberg expects the new facility to be operational by the end of 2011 or in early 2012.
For UniversityNews.Org, I’m Bruce Cochrane.
*This first appeared in the September 9 edition of University News, a presentation of the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Agricultural & Food Sciences, to learn more click here.
