Increasing Dairy Farm Productivity Through Stormwater Harvesting, Resource Recovery and Recycling. Progress Report 2: Site Preparation and Monitoring Set-up

This report is the second in a series of three progress reports for the Increasing Dairy Farm Productivity Through Stormwater Harvesting, Resource Recovery and Recycling research project. Covering the period from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2015, it documents the activities undertaken in the second half of the first year of the project, which has a two-year lifespan. The project has been initiated to trial a new approach to managing effluent and runoff from dairy sheds in a conventional two-pond treatment and storage system that is designed to improve handling of manure solids and control salt levels in recycled effluent, and in the process increase nutrient recovery rates. It involves retrofitting an existing pond system to enable the distribution to land of a slurry mixture of pond sludge and effluent from the primary pond via irrigation, and the harvesting of stormwater runoff in the secondary pond. The overall aim is to achieve greater farm productivity while protecting catchment water quality. The performance of the retrofit system is to be gauged through monitoring flows and constituents of fresh water, effluent, runoff, and sludge entering, within and leaving the ponds. Outputs of nutrients and pathogens to land are to be compared against outputs from a ‘control’ system – a two-pond system incorporating effluent recycling on a comparable dairy farm.