Lorimor endorses alternative water quality measures

I strap into my smooth red and white aluminum cocoon And spread my wings. I levitate to the world of three dimensions The world of loops and rolls and banks Of left and right, and up and down, 150 miles per hour across the ground. — from Little Airports are Nice Places, by Jeff Lorimor Jeff Lorimor Jeff Lorimor, whose hobby is building and flying planes, has ample opportunity to observe Iowa’s countryside from lofty heights. He knows the location and size of the state’s feedlots and can even detect management practices. He can clearly see, for example, which farmers have applied manure by spraying it on top of the soil rather than injecting it below the surface. But Lorimor, a manure management specialist, doesn’t need the vantage point of his plane to land on a professional guiding principle. “Sometimes news reporters make it sound as though the whole state of Iowa is covered with manure six inches deep. It’s not true. We grow lots of crops and the crops need lots of nutrients. In fact, we have enough land for all of the manure our animals produce, plus a whole lot more.” Lorimor, who has spent the past 20 years helping Iowa farmers do a better job managing manure, knows first-hand the consequences of a non-sustainable farming system. After investing 10 years of energy and too much money on a family farm where he grew up in south-central Iowa, he left the farming and livestock business. “I was part of the 1980s fall-out,” he remembers. “Too much debt.” He spent the next eight years as an Iowa State extension area engineer and then the next 12 as an animal waste specialist. At age 53 he wrote a dissertation on liquid swine manure and its effect on water quality and received his doctorate in agricultural engineering from Iowa State. His gentle practicality and sincere caring have won him the respect of academics, farmers and regulators, says colleague John Lawrence, associate professor of economics. “He’s a practical scientist. His audiences relate to him because of his humble approach and practical foundation.” And a sense of humor doesn’t hurt. Colleague Angie Rieck-Hinz, an Iowa State agronomy extension program specialist, remembers the time Lorimor was conducting a workshop on how to analyze manure samples to determine nutrient concentrations. He was surrounded by jars of brown, murky liquid, and at the conclusion of the workshop, took a sip from one of them – the one that held iced tea. “People want to hear what Jeff has to say, because he makes it fun and makes it practical,” says Rieck-Hinz. “He can boil down complicated practices and regulatory requirements into easily understood concepts.” When he talks about his years working directly with farmers as an extension engineer, Lorimor’s face glows. “I loved that job!” His extension work continued (he received the college’s Superior Engineering Extension Award in 2003) after he left his position in the field, but his client base changed. Increasingly, he became a liaison between commodity organizations and the state’s Department of Natural Resources, as he worked to establish a statewide manure applicator certification program. 'I don’t think we can ever eliminate all odor' He is calmly pragmatic about methods of controlling livestock odor at its three sources — confinement buildings, storage pits and from the fields when manure is applied as a nutrient. Injecting manure into the soil rather than applying it on top can reduce odor by 80 to 90 percent, he says. And applying covers of chopped straw and corn stalks “works very, very well at eliminating odor from the storage pit.” But odor that comes from the confinement building represents the biggest challenge, he says. ”One of the best technologies is to pull air from the building through a fan and blow it through a compost pile. When it comes through that aerobic bio-material, the odor goes out of it. But the problem is that here in Iowa, most of our swine buildings are naturally ventilated; air doesn’t go through fans. “I don’t think we can ever eliminate all odor. There are still opportunities to reduce it by getting producers to use more new technologies. Not all of them are doing as much as they could. But hardly anybody is doing nothing.” “Based on my experience, I think odor is greatly exaggerated by a vast majority of people. You can drive all over the state and seldom smell any odor.” Controlling open feedlot run-off For the past few years, Lorimor has left odor control research to his colleagues, and returned his focus to water quality, an area he says he prefers. “You have more control over water than with air. You can see water flow and see where it goes and do something about it.” Lorimor’s goal has been to develop new ways to capture open feedlot runoff that could replace the method currently required by state regulations. Current regulations require that producers who keep more than 1,000 cattle in an open feedlot must catch runoff in a basin and then pump it onto their fields. According to Lorimor, the method is expensive, high-maintenance and a burden for farmers. If the basins aren’t kept pumped properly, a good rain can cause them to overflow. And because Iowa farmers don’t irrigate their land, they lack equipment and expertise in pumping methods. In addition, he says, the public doesn’t like the “catchment” basins. “There was a feedlot producer in southeast Iowa who wanted to install a catch basin, as he’s supposed to do according to the law. His neighbors got upset, because they equated a catchment with a swine lagoon.” Lorimor has been studying alternative technologies that include a grass filter, and an infiltration basin, in which water soaks into a bermed, grassy area and is caught by underground tiles. He and his colleagues have found these methods as effective as current state requirements, he says, and have invested considerable energy trying to convince state regulators that they should be used as alternative technologies. What does a manure specialist/poet/pilot do upon retirement? Lorimor’s response is prompt and exuberant. He is required to be on campus on his last day of work, June 30. The following day he will depart for Alaska, where he will spend a month on a fishing boat, part of a two-man crew that will net salmon as they leave the ocean for the rivers. “When you’re on the beach and you see fishing boats, you wonder what they’re doing out there. It’s a big mystery. Now I’m going to find out if it’s as romantic as it looks. Then I’ll really know I’ve retired,” he said.