Poultry feather wastes recycling possibility as soil nutrient

Abstract

Poultry feathers are produced in large amounts as a waste in poultry slaughterhouses. Only 60-70% of the poultry slaughterhouse products are edible for human being. This means more million tons annually worldwide (Papadopoulus et al., 1986; Williams et al., 1991; Hegedűs et al., 1998). The keratin-content of feather can be difficulty digested, so physical, chemical and/or biological pre-treatment are needed in practice, which have to be set according to the utilization method. Feather was enzymatic degraded, and then fermented in separated bioreactors. The anaerobic bioreactor system (4 digesters with 6 litre volume) was controlled by ACE SCADA software running on Linux platforms. Pot scale seed germination tests were established to suggest the quantity of digested slurry to be utilized. The chosen test plants were lettuce (Lactuca sativa). In case of reproduction test Student’s t-test was applied to examine significant differences between the root lengths of the control and the treated plant species. In case of pot seed germination variance analysis with Tukey B’s and Duncan test was applied to examine significant differences between the root lengths of plants, grown on different treatments. The effect of treatments on germination ability of the plant species was expressed in the percentage of the controls. According to Student’s t-test significant difference was found between root lengths of different treatments. Based on variance analysis with Tukey B’s and Duncan tests could be detected a significant difference between the treatments. Utilization of the fermented material reduces the use of fertilizers and because of its large moisture content it reduces the watering costs. Recycle of the slaughterhouse feather and different agricultural wastes and by-products can solve three main problems: disposal of harmful materials, producing of renewable energy and soil nutrient, measuring reflectance at the certain spectral range, which can facilitate real time water status assessment of orchards.

Keywords

• poultry feather, recycle, seed germination, root length

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