Cheese, cows and manure—systems approach makes tough decisions easier to digest

Wisconsin is known as America`s Dairyland. More than one-third of all the cows in United States live on more than 3,000 farms in Wisconsin.

Those bovine residents contribute to a thriving dairy industry, but milk is not the only thing they produce in prodigious quantities. That many cows inevitably lead to a significant amount of manure.

"It is a horribly complex problem and we all contribute to it and are affected by it," says Victor Zavala, a University of Wisconsin–Madison chemical and biological engineering professor who is working on a new approach to manure management. "Farms generate the manure, and we are all affected by its environmental impacts. But manure production is driven by strong economic forces originating from urban areas that demand dairy products."...

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Ken Notes: Wisconsin should invent, manufacture, and distribute cost effective waste management digestion systems that could treat waste from farms to third world human waste. Imagine the market for a product that could turn waste into usable methane and remove the pathogens from the effluent turning it back into usable soil. The inventor will be the next Bill Gates!