Bettencourt Dairy in Wendell, Idaho houses over 13,000 Jersey dairy cows with a crossvent scrapped barn. At this dairy, the milking cows produce an average of 18 gallons of manure, per cow, per day, plus some added parlor water.
Previously, the farm used only conventional slope screens for their primary separation which removed the coarse material. The farm had to dredge their 200 acre-foot waste lagoon once a year.
Bettencourt Dairy needed to process and meet their nutrient management plan when they added cross vents and vacuum trucks to move the manure from the barns. In 2018, they decided to add a Centrisys CS26-4DT dewatering centrifuge to remove the fines from the manure.
“We saw the Centrisys centrifuge as the only piece of equipment that was going to be able to get the solids out of our water,” Don Brand, Bettencourt Dairy Operations Manager of Equipment and Buildings. “The centrifuge seemed like the only piece of equipment that would be able to grow and expand with the operation.”
Without added chemicals, the CS26-4DT centrifuge removes most of the solids, typically leaving less than 1% total suspended solids in the effluent manure that previously went into the lagoons. In other words, instead of dredging a few feet of solids from the lagoon, the Centrisys centrifuge reduces the solids down to only few inches. Now, the farm only has to dredge their waste lagoon once every 2 to 3 years instead of every year. The residual manure solids is 25% total solids and is resold as compost fertilizer.
“The Centrisys centrifuge was the first piece of equipment that we bought for manure processing that worked from the beginning the exact way it was promised,” Brand said.
