DAIRIEES: Dairy Farm Environmental Management System

Manure management is a major concern for dairy farms, as manure contains significant quantities of greenhouse gases and concentrated nutrients. Current manure management practices consist of using it as fertilizer, which releases greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and often leads to overloading fields with nutrients and runoff into water supplies. The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has teamed with University of Idaho and Boise State University to create a novel treatment system that mitigates many of the current environmental concerns and creates value added products from the manure including bio-plastics, electricity, fertilizer, and animal bedding. INL is releasing DAIRIEES, as an open source project available free to the general public. DAIRIEES allows users to enter characteristics about a dairy farm’s manure, manure management plan, and regional market. Based on these inputs the options are analyzed in detail using data from laboratory research to determine the most efficient use of this material.