patentECO - No-Till Poultry Litter

No-till poultry litter

The Shenandoah Valley, where I live, is a major poultry producing area. The Valley lies within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a 64,000 square-mile area that contributes tributary flow, and pollutants, to the Nation’s largest and most productive estuary. In 2010, the Chesapeake Bay watershed produced more than 1 billion broiler chickens, 27.5 million turkeys, and 1.5 million tons of poultry litter, which is the bedding material and poultry manure produced by the poultry houses that raise the birds. Poultry litter contains significant amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, and represents a valuable source of agricultural fertilizer (and a potential alternative energy source).

These 1.5 million tons of litter also represent a significant source of nonpoint source pollution to the region’s waterways after the litter is applied to farm fields. An article this morning in our local paper covered a research project now underway in the area that is testing a new piece of agricultural equipment that can potentially reduce pollutant loads from field-applied poultry litter.

The equipment injects poultry litter below the surface of a field in a manner similar to that used in no-till agricultural practices. After some detective work, I found that this equipment was recently granted a US patent.

Patent number 7,814,848, “System for distributing poultry litter below the soil surface,” was granted to Daniel H. Pote (Booneville, AR) and Stephen M. Haller (Magazine, AR) on October 19, 2010. Pote and Haller are employees at the Dale Bumpers Small Farm Research Center in Arkansas; the Center is a part of the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. The patent is assigned to USDA. It is classified as 111/130, which covers planting technology that uses broadcasting. As of early January 2012, 278 patents are found in this subclass, with the earliest issued in 1841 for a rotary cultivator. It was Patent number 2,040; check out the drawing — it’s art.

Back to the present. Claim 1 states:

“An apparatus for distributing soil amendment materials comprising:

a) a plurality of soil cutting blades effective to cut a plurality of substantially parallel trenches in the soil when pulled through the soil in a direction of travel;

b) a dispenser for delivering soil amendment material to the trench cut in the soil rearward of said cutting blades, wherein said dispenser comprises:
1) a receptacle comprising opposed front and rear walls and opposed side walls, an inlet for said material, and a lower surface extending between said walls;
2) said lower surface comprising a plurality of substantially parallel elongated troughs disposed substantially longitudinally along the length thereof, each of said troughs having an outlet at the bottom thereof, wherein each said outlet is positioned adjacent to one of said front wall or rear wall and rearward of and over the path of travel of one of said cutting blades effective to dispense said material to said trench in the soil;
3) a plurality of screw augers, wherein one said auger is disposed in each of said troughs and said augers are adapted to both transport said material in a direction along the length of said troughs toward said outlets and grind or shear said material as said material is transported;
4) an upstanding face plate disposed laterally between said side walls substantially perpendicular to said troughs and augers, and on the side of said outlets which is upstream from said direction of transport of said material in said troughs, said face plate defining first and second volumes within said receptacle, said first volume being upstream of said face plate relative to said direction of transport of said material, and said second volume being downstream of said face plate relative to said direction of transport of said material and encompassing said outlets; and
5) said face plate comprising a bottom edge adjacent said troughs and an upper edge disposed above the uppermost radial edge of said augers, and said face plate further comprising a plurality of openings through which said screw augers pass.”

This technology, found in the patentECO Agriculture Index, allows biodegradable solid soil amendment material, such as poultry litter, to be disposed of in soil by cutting soil trenches, grinding or shearing the material, and distributing it to the trenches in the soil.

A November 2010 press release from ARS announced that an exclusive license was awarded to BBI Spreaders of Cornelia, GA to commercialize this technology. BBI’s spreaders can also use precision agriculture electronics. ARS estimates that nutrient losses from field application of poultry litter can be reduced by 90 percent. Widespread use of these spreaders could make a significant contribution to the long-term and ongoing efforts to improve water quality in Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

patentECO - Is Your Garden Clean or Green?

Is your garden clean and green?

It’s time to think of gardening. One of the tricks known for many years to get an early start on fresh vegetables is to warm the soil. Another related trick to increase your garden’s yield is to limit weed growth and competition for soil nutrients.

How are these gardening techniques related?

Plastic mulch.

Uri Peled (Zichron Yaakov, Israel) and Karl Heinz Bartnig (Ruethen, Germany) were issued patent number 6,601,338, “Plastic film for use in agriculture”, on August 5, 2003. The patent is classified as 47/9, which is Plant husbandry, mulching.

Claim 1 of the invention states:

“A polymeric, multilayer, photoselective mulch film for use in agriculture, Comprising at least two layers, an upper layer facing the sky and a lower layer facing the ground, each of said layers being of a different color, and each being light-transmissive;

wherein said upper layer is of a color which repels insects, and said lower layer is of a color whereby the solar radiation transmitted by said film and reaching the ground is of such a spectral composition as will largely deprive weeds of essential photosynthetically active radiation, while having a spectral component that will be absorbed by, and will heat, the ground.”

That’s pretty self-explanatory. There are obviously other inventions related to mulching of garden and commercial crops. These inventions are found in the agriculture domain of patentECO.

You might be interested to also learn of the two earliest clean tech patents for mulching technology.

The earliest was patented in 1867, by William Griffith of North East, PA. His invention, patent number 64,760 entitled “Mode of propagating grape-vines from single buds in the open field,” claimed “[t]he mode of propagating grape-vines, substantially as set forth, in open-field culture, by covering single bud cuttings with a cold mulch, applied in sufficient depth to keep down the temperature of the bud, and thereby retard its sprouting until the roots have been adequately developed.” His preferred mulch was a two-inch covering of “sawdust, tan [this was the depleted bark from leather tanning operations], or other suitable material.” His intention to increase crop yield through better bud propagation, and his use of sawdust or depleted leather tanning bark as the mulch, all qualify as clean tech, in two different domains, in fact. Agriculture (yield enhancement) and Industry (recycling).

The second oldest mulching patent was number 80,053, “Improved mode of mulching strawberry-beds”, issued in 1868 to Joseph Brett of Geneva, OH. Brett’s invention, also intended to enhance crop yields, relied on planting his own mulch: “The mode of mulching strawberry-beds by sowing thereon the seeds of plants [he preferred oats, but “other plants of analogous character may be used.”], the stalks or blades of which are intended to serve as a mulch therefor, substantially as set forth.” Again, clean tech in multiple domains.

Much of what we consider now to be clean technology is old clean technology with new packaging or using newer materials.

patentECO - LightSquared & Clean Tech

LightSquared & Clean Tech

A recent Cnet article regarding the LightSquared controversy caught my eye. The article states that “The company has been battling the perception that its network could possibly cripple critical GPS devices--hurting planes, farming equipment, and consumer devices.”

For those of you not familiar with LightSquared, it hopes to build a nationwide wireless broadband and satellite network. There are significant fears on the part of GPS providers, the US military, and others that the proposed network will seriously degrade the nation’s GPS system due to potentially overlapping frequency bands and the power of LightSquared’s transmitters. Government tests concluded this fall showed that LightSquared's base station transmitters created harmful interference for 75 percent of the 92 GPS devices used within the test -- greater than 100 yards away from the base station. LightSquared received a conditional waiver from the Federal Communications Commission in January 2010 to build tens of thousands of stations nationwide. Naturally, LightSquared has strongly disagreed with the test results.

So how is this clean tech? Certainly, a nationwide wireless broadband network would play a role in supporting clean technologies though its ability to transmit large amounts of data to and from rural locations at very high transmission rates. That’s not the link that interests me here, though.

It’s the potential for degrading existing clean technology in the form of precision farming equipment.

A case in point is patent number 6,553,299, “Methods and apparatus for precision agriculture operations utilizing real time kinematic global positioning system systems.” This patent, invented by Russell J. Keller, Mark E. Nichols, Arthur F. Lange and assigned to Trimble Navigation Ltd. (Sunnyvale, CA) was granted on April 22, 2003. It is classified as 701/50. Class 701 of the US Patent Classification system covers data processing inventions for vehicles, navigation, and relative location. Subclass 50 includes construction or agricultural-type vehicles. Many GPS inventions potentially affected by interference with the GPS transmission frequencies are found in this class.

Claim 1 states:

“A method of seeding, comprising:

computing a seeding pattern for at least a portion of a plot of land from one or more data values retrieved from a computer readable storage medium, wherein said seeding pattern is updated for each of a number of planting periods according to a micro crop rotation scheme;

controlling a vehicle so as to follow said computed seeding pattern over said plot of land using positioning information provided by one or more sources of GPS information;

and planting seeds in desired locations within the plot of land by comparing a vehicle position determined using the positioning information to the seeding pattern.”

This invention (one of many in the GPS-enabled precision ag patentECO ecosystem) provides highly accurate seeding, cultivating, planting and/or harvesting operations. Cultivating operations can include precision weed removal (e.g., using a vehicle fitted with weed eradication mechanisms such as augers and/or herbicide sprayers). Crop specific fertilizer or pesticide application is also enabled through the use of centimeter-level accuracy positioning techniques.

Precision agriculture inventions that incorporate GPS technology, such as this one, are a key component of clean technology in the patentECO agriculture patent space. Potential threats to the stability and accuracy of the system should be of great concern.

patentECO - Clean Fertilizers for Agriculture

Clean fertilizers for agriculture?

According to US Department of Agriculture statistics, from July 30, 2008 through June 30, 2009, 17.7 million tons of primary inorganic plant nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium — the N-P-K on your bag of fertilizer) were used in the US. For selected secondary, micronutrients, and natural organic materials (gypsum, sulfur, sulfuric acid, zinc, compost, dried manure, sewage sludge, and other organic materials), FY2009 saw 2.3 million tons consumed. For comparison, the total weight (20 million tons) is the equivalent of 220 Washington Monuments.

“Bio-processed mineral fertilisers including micro-elements”, patent number 8,066,793, was issued on November 29, 2011 to Clive Prebble Sinclair (Pukekohe, New Zealand) and assigned to Kagree Holdings Limited (Waiku, New Zealand). The patent is classified as 71/8, which includes inventions using bacterial fermentation or decomposition processes to produce fertilizer. For a historical perspective, the earliest US patent (number 26,184) issued in this class and subclass was for improvement in fertilizers to Louis Harper of Navasink, NJ on November 22, 1859.

Claim 1 states:

A bio-processed mineral fertiliser comprising:

a crushed phosphate-rich mineral substrate, the mineral substrate having been at least partially rendered bioavailable by a composting process utilizing microorganisms;

organic proteinaceous matter;

cellulose-rich particulate material;

and an effective amount of one or more selected microelements, the microelement being chelatedly bound to the organic proteinaceous matter and/or to the mineral substrate component wherein the fertiliser has a neutral pH, and is capable of slowly releasing the bound one or more microelements over an extended period of time after application of the fertiliser to soil, yet not exposing the composting microorganisms or existing soil microorganisms to a toxic concentration of said one or more selected microelements.

The invention describes a method of including micro-elements in a dry, flowable fertilizer of degraded minerals together with micro-organisms by the use of chelated microelements within the nutrients provided to the micro-organisms at the start of a composting procedure. The minerals can include limestone, zeolites, serpentine, or rock phosphate or a combination, ground to a particle size of 0.3-0.7 mm, and used in part as a digestible substrate (which becomes partly decomposed) by the micro-organisms which are nourished with some waste protein material under relatively high temperatures for a period of weeks. The waste protein material used as nutrients usually comprises waste from the fishing industry (about 70% by weight of a catch is not used for human consumption).

Several aspects of this invention are noteworthy and allow it to be located in multiple locations within the patentECO clean technology ecosystem.

• This biomediated fertilizer will result in an increased microbial biomass in the soil, which will enhance crop yields and provide a carbon dioxide sink.
• The total amount of a microelements required for effective treatment is far less (than with conventional crop treatments) when the microelement has been included into the biomass, than if the microelement was spread on the land as an inorganic salt. Further, toxic effects of direct application on soil micro-organisms are absent. Release is slow and is likely to be directly from micro-organism to plant root hairs within or near the rhizosphere, so that waterways are not contaminated.
• The invention is capable of consuming considerable quantities of fish offal (that is, the about 70% of the original catch of a fishing vessel that is not usable as fish fillets).
• Macro- and micronutrients are released to the soil slowly, thus reducing episodic loading to neighboring waterways following rain and snowmelt events.

Increased agricultural use of fertilizers such as this could be an important contributor to reducing nonpoint source nutrient loads to water resources like Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, and to increasing crop yields in a cost-effective way for farmers.