Water/Nutrient Recycling Project

This extension program works with stakeholders in the national agricultural community to encourage systematic evaluation of manure nutrient management, and adoption of nutrient water recycling technology. Our collaboration team is funded by USDA NIFA program (five-year project, $4.3 million) to identify and document opportunities and challenges to implementation. We have been working with production facilities that are successful in utilizing water recycling technology, and collecting critical information for the research and extension components. We are also collaborating with successful and practical technical providers to collect information for the research project and on-farm implementation. The target audience included engineers, agricultural facility owners and staff, manure handling operators, extension staff, regulators, and other stakeholders.

Our recent efforts consisted of an organized special session titled Wastewater Treatment for Water and Nutrient Recycling Stakeholder Perspectives (approximately 25 participants) and a highlighted technical session titled Manure Treatment Systems and Anaerobic Digestion and Fermentation (~75 participants) at the 2019 Waste to Worth conference. Additionally, the project was introduced and discussed in a technical subcommittee meeting (~25 participants) at the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) conference. The team also hosted the 2019 Arkansas Water Resources Conference (AWRC), with invited speakers presenting on topics of agricultural and municipal waste management.