Freund's Farm Inc., North Canaan, Conn.
Plop, Plop, Biz, Biz Dairy Farmers Hope to Market Pots Made of Manure

Standing by an 800,000-gallon lagoon of watery cow flop, Ben Freund summed up the problem he and other Connecticut dairy farmers face. "Nobody wants anybody else's [manure],'' Freund said.

Well, they do want a little, but the packaged manure that backyard gardeners buy does not come close to depleting the great loads piling up at modern dairy farms. The nitrogen and phosphorus in that manure can foul waterways, and livestock farmers nationwide are in the crosshairs of environmental agencies.

Freund and his brother Matt, who run Freund's Farm Inc., have been working on a solution. It's called the "poop pot.'' The pot would be made mostly of compressed, dried cow manure. Filled with a growing medium, it would give a seedling necessary nutrients, then go into the ground at planting time and eventually decompose.

The Freunds are members of the Canaan Valley Agricultural Co-op. Through the Litchfield County Conservation District, the seven-farm co-op recently received $33,000 from the federal government to develop the poop pot. "If this thing clicks, these guys can probably make more money on the manure than they can on milk,'' said Daniel Beaudette, a federal agriculture official. Milk has not been a big money-maker, and Connecticut dairy farmers have had to get bigger to survive. The Freunds have 240 cows; Beaudette said the norm in the area is several hundred.

At the same time, he said, environmental enforcement of clean water laws has become "much more pronounced in the last few years.'' At farms, enforcement has focused on the so-called concentrated animal feeding operation. In today's large dairy outfits, cows are kept much of the time under a roof rather than in pastures. (The Freunds still graze their animals five months of the year.) The waste from each animal, including bedding that must be replaced, is about 150 pounds per day, Ben Freund said.

The Freunds have been trying to keep ahead of the load. They installed a state-funded methane digester that provides some heat and hot water to the farm buildings, and they devised an efficient system to pipe manure from the plastic-lined lagoon to the 650 acres of crop fields they own and rent.

Still, the area watershed contains excess nutrients, said Joseph Wettemann, senior sanitary engineer with the state Department of Environmental Protection. The agency is pursuing a permit program in which farmers across the state would have to develop management plans detailing the nutrients needed for fertilization of their crops and the excess. Most farmers will have excess manure, Wettemann said. The poop pot and other alternative uses for manure, including seed strips and mulch, have the potential to help solve the problem, benefiting the environment while making money for area farmers, said Beaudette, regional director of community and business programs for the rural development arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the poop pot is a ways off from mass production. The pot would be bulkier than the thin plastic cells most nurseries use for young plants, so packaging and storage are hurdles. Also, the pot would have to hold up to repeated watering before it went in the ground and would have to be affordable enough to catch on not only with home gardeners but with the nursery industry.

Odor control is another problem with the prototypes developed so far, Beaudette said. "If you put them on a shelf in Kmart, it's not going to go over too well,'' he said. Lorraine Calder, president of White Flower Farm Inc. in Litchfield, said she recognizes that plastic "is a recycling bear,'' but it remains the material of choice for her nursery and others because it does not tear or deteriorate like peat, stores easily and retains moisture, which is especially important for shipping.

Nevertheless, the state's deputy agriculture commissioner, Bruce Gresczyk, called the poop pot "an example of Yankee ingenuity.'' "Farmers, not only in Connecticut but across the nation, must look at ways to deal with excess nutrients,'' Gresczyk said. Freund said, "We want to be at the front of the wave of manure management.''