Impact of land use fragmentation and larger herd sizes on manure recycling energy and cost

Excerpt

Farms are increasingly part of a multifunctional landscape-that is, an expanding set of stakeholders have increasingly diverse expectations for shared geographic areas. Uses such as housing and recreation fragment the formerly contiguous areas of land that once surrounded many farmsteads, so farmers increasingly must travel past and work adjacent to lands used for purposes other than agriculture. At the same time, livestock herds are consolidating into fewer and larger units, and management of manure from these herds is increasingly regulated to reduce non-point source water pollution. Environmentally sound recycling of manure from ever-larger herds requires greater energy and planning for transport and spreading within a landscape that is a mosaic of land uses.

We studied theoretically how the fragmentation of the landscape surrounding a confined livestock herd increased the distance that manure had to be hauled in order to prevent accumulation of phosphorus in crop land soil. We also evaluated the effect of herd size. Landscape fragmentation was expressed as the fraction of land surrounding the herd's barn that was available for manure spreading. The total transport requirement changed very little initially as we decreased the fraction of land that was available for spreading from …