What do athletic fields at Hempfield schools, abandoned strip mines in Northumberland County and first-of-its-kind groundwater recharge landscaping at a Lititz housing development all have in common?
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Compost from manure gathered in Lancaster County.
For more than a year now, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and partners have used an $800,000 federal grant to explore ways to take excessive cow and poultry manure in the Conestoga watershed and make them beneficial and valuable in non-polluting ways.
Other large-scale composting projects have been tried through the years. Most have failed.
With consensus among scientists that nutrient pollution — Lancaster County is a prime source — is the biggest obstacle blocking major cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, finding ways to keep manure out of streams has become a state and federal priority.
Most of the manure in the composting experiment comes from poultry gathered from farmers served by the Rheems-based Wenger Feed Mill. But liquid cow manure and horse bedding also are thrown into the mix.
Composting locks in nutrients for slow release, and prevents them from being released into water and air.
About 30,000 tons of manure have been composted since 2007 on a Fulton Township farm and farmed out in wide-ranging ways.
Among the uses:
• Soccer fields at Comet Field in Manor Township and various athletic fields at Elizabethtown College and the Hempfield School District use the compost on top of turf to make greener grass and reduce compaction.
• Five tractor-trailer loads of compost were trucked to abandoned mine lands in Northumberland and Schuylkill counties where a nonprofit group, Habitat for Wildlife, helped turn a moonscape into meadows of grasses.
• Some 30 truckloads were spread on strip mines in Clearfield County as part of a Penn State research project to see how compost stacks up against raw poultry manure and pulp mill sludge in reclaiming barren mine land.
• Homefields Farm, an organic farm cooperative near Millersville run by Goodwill Industries, recently began using the compost in gardens to grow produce.
• In the Butterfly Acres neighborhood in Lititz, LandStudies, an environmental restoration firm that specializes in wetlands, used the compost for an innovative re-working of an old stormwater swale so that it recharges underground aquifers while sporting native plants.
• Paradise Township is considering using the compost to revegetate a sewer line project. The material is more fertile than dirt and straw, and, because it holds moisture better, is less prone to erosion.
"I think it's been successful," Harry Campbell, staff scientist for the Pennsylvania office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, says of the composting project to date. "I hope we are able to demonstrate even more uses."
Indeed, new grants totaling $1.1 million in state, federal and Chesapeake Bay Foundation money will be used to bring compost to the masses.
A large-scale composting operation to be set up at Oregon Dairy in Manheim Township will begin in the fall, pending zoning approvals from the township.
By next spring, suburban residents likely will be able to buy from the lawn and garden center at the Oregon Pike facility bagged compost — or perhaps bring their own bags to fill — for their fruit and vegetable gardens or to improve their lawns.
The quantity available could also supply landscapers or other businesses, Campbell said.
Campbell says thoroughly treated compost is superior to commercial fertilizer for gardens and lawn use. Raw manure is not. But composted manure is like a "slow-drip" of nutrients to plants.
The Oregon Dairy facility — initially served by the Hurst family's 300 to 400 head of dairy cows — will be built with expansion in mind so that manure can be collected from more farmers.
"The idea is to really start to address the excess manure in the general area," says Campbell. "This will be a prime location for manure-based composting where it is front and center in the population density of Lancaster County."
The project will be funded with $700,000 in federal money channeled through the Environmental Defense Fund, $330,000 from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and $100,000 from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The Fulton Township composting facility is on the Graywood Farm of R. Stephen and Joseph Graybeal. The composting operation and sales of compost are conducted by Terra-Gro, a Nottingham-based manure-management business. Terra-Gro also will run the composting at Oregon Dairy.
Campbell isn't touting manure composting as the silver bullet solution to Pennsylvania's considerable nutrient problems.
"This is really only one tool in the toolbox," he says. "Composting does have a high startup cost. What has doomed many composting facilities is not finding large-scale and sustainable uses of the product.
"That's what we're really exploring."
Staff writer Ad Crable can be reached at acrable@LNPnews.com or 481-6029.
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