Particulate matter from open lot dairies and cattle feeding: recent developments
Channel: Livestock & Poultry Environ. Learning Community
Date: 2015-05-14

The full proceedings paper is at: http://www.extension.org/72731

The research community is making good progress in understanding the mechanical, biochemical, and atmospheric processes that are responsible for airborne emissions of particulate matter (PM, or dust) from open-lot livestock production, especially dairies and cattle feedyards.  Recent studies in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, California, and Australia have expanded the available data on both emission rates and abatement measures. Although the uncertainties associated with our estimates of fugitive emissions are still unacceptably high, we have learned from our recent experience with ammonia that using a wide variety of credible measurement techniques, rather than focusing on one so-called “standard” technique, may be the better way to improve confidence in our estimates.  Whereas the most promising control measures for gaseous emissions continue to be dietary strategies  with management of corral-surface moisture a close second for particulate matter, corral-surface management and moisture management play comparable roles, depending on the mechanical strength of soils and the availability of water, respectively.  The cost per unit reduction of emitted mass attributable to these abatement measures varies as widely as the emissions estimates themselves, so we need to intensify our emphasis on process-based emissions research to (a) reduce the variances in our emissions estimates and (b) mitigate the contingency of prior, empirically based estimates.  As a general rule, although cattle feedyard emission factors may be thought a reasonable starting point for estimating emissions from open-lot dairies, such estimates should be viewed with suspicion.