Nutrient Runoff to Watershed from Land Application Area of Animal Waste

In many cases, compost and liquid fertilizer produced from animal waste were dumped to a farming site without considering the surrounding water environment including groundwater. Also, groundwater contamination by nitrate exceeded water quality criteria (10 mg NO₃⁻-N/L) occur at animal farming site in Korea. The primary purpose of this study is to achieve the level of the nutrients (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus) required to grow the planned crop by balancing the nutrients and to minimize of the nutrients movement to the ground and surface water. To get an optimized application loading of the animal waste, we surveyed the unit concentration of the animal waste resources produced from several pig and cattle farms, and compared the runoff nutrient concentrations from the each area applied with composted animal resources and liquid pig farm fertilizers. An artificial rainfall test and a controlled nutrient application test were also conducted in the field tests. A set of our field test with the liquid fertilizer presented that 79% of the input nitrogen was emitted to the ground water and only 1.5 % of that by surface runoff.