New Technology Turns Large Amounts of Waste Into Something Useful
With miles and miles of crops, US need for fertilizer continues to grow. To help support this need, a Texas inventor, William “Dean” Holz, developed a new process for making fertilizer. Holz originally developed the new process in 1991 while working with fertilization and bio remediation. The process manages dairy waste materials by converting the highest quality liquid compost into stable, consistent concentrates. In its new manufacturing facility in Belton, Texas, Stet Corp stabilizes and preserves the nutrients found in the raw material to create all-natural, biodegradable and safe products, using the Holz process.
StetCorp’s refined technology produces large amounts of renewable natural resources for places that need good fertilizer to raise crops for biofuels or ethanol. The process was developed over 10 years, with the first prototype created in Texas.
Fuel costs drive up chemical fertilizer costs and this will only get worse as time goes on. The U.S. imports more than half of it’s nitrogen fertilizer to grow crops, and it takes a lot of energy to make nitrogen fertilizer. Between 70 to 90 percent of the cost of making nitrogen fertilizer goes to natural gas.
The percentage of corn going into ethanol has increased from 7% to 20% this year. Last year the U.S. planted about 82 million acres of corn and this year could be upwards of 90 million acres. The amount of corn used for ethanol increased from 700 million bushels in 2001-02 to a projected 2.2 billion bushels this year.
Stet found a way to take agricultural waste from the dairy farms and make prime fertilizers, so this new technology can help reduce the amount of fertilizer imported into the U.S.
On dairy farms, each dairy cow produces more than 100 pounds of waste a day. A small Freestall dairy operation can have around 1,000 head of dairy cows. Each day they produce 100,000 lbs of waste. Multiply that by 365 days a year, and that adds up to an astounding 36,500,000 pounds of waste a year.
As the world population continues to grow, animal concentrations must increase to supply adequate amounts of food. That creates an increasing amount of waste and uses up natural resources.
Note: Each cow produces as much waste a day as 120 people. There are over 9 million head of dairy cows in the U.S. With the new technologies developed by Stet, a major problem can be turned into a great solution.
