[Digestion] Digestate comparison to liquid worm castings (Alexander Eaton)

[davidf@kingdombio.co.uk Fulford]

Matt, Hello,

SKG Sagha and VK-NARDEP are both Ashden award winners (see their entries 
under www.ashden.org - winners) who use vermi-composting of bogas plant 
effluent. I am working with SKG Sangha, who sell biogas units to local 
farmers in South India which use cattle dung as a feed. The liquid effluent 
is mixed with dry biomass (straw, grass, dead leaves etc) and composted. 
The compost is then put in rectangular containers with worms. The women 
scrape of the worm casts each day. They keep the rest of the compost moist 
and covered from the sun.

The worm castes are dried and bagged. Richer people from Bangalore are 
willing to pay up to $1000 a tonne for the compost in the Indian equivalent 
of a garden centre to use in their own gardens.  

So you are not wasting your time: you are onto a winning approach. The dry 
biomass absorbes the nitrogen, which is lost if the wet slutty is dried, as 
you suggest.

Best wishes,

David Fulford 



----------------------------------------
From: "Matt Lorig" <mattlorig at yahoo.com>
Sent: 03 December 2011 21:25
To: "Digestion at bioenergylists.org" <Digestion at bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Digestion] Digestate comparison to liquid worm castings 
(Alexander Eaton) 

Hello everyone,
I want to get a dry fertilizer product that I can bag and hopefully sell.   
I have been planning to take my liquid digestate and add sawdust or 
something similar to dry it and then have the worms eat that.   I've read 
somewhere that if I was to filter and dry the digestate I would lose a lot 
of N with the water.  I know I would lower the Nitrogen percent by adding 
the sawdust but would I gain by not losing the Nitrogen with the water?  
Also seems I would improve the fertilizer by having worm casts and more 
microorganisms from the worms gut.  
I'm about ready to actually start this but since the subject has come up 
again I thought I should ask the list for
 comments.  It would be nice to know before I start if I'm wasting my time. 
Matt Lorig
mattlorig at yahoo.com
 
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