Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Environmentally friendly and profitable way to dispose of waste hay

A Malaysian company Watanwaja Agrofarm (M) Sdn. Bhd. run by the enterprising pair - Jarnuri Tahrir and Rozaini Abdul Halim has after 2 decades of research and development and learning from Korea and Indonesia, developed a way of using the hundreds of tonnes of waste hay left over from padi harvest at the end of every harvest season at Sabak Bernam and turn it into saleable fertilizer and live-stock feed. The waste hay previously are normally burnt, causing air pollution. So this development is highly welcomed from an environmental point of view, and also generate some income for the padi farmers and Watanwaja.

Watanwaja pays the farmers RM130 for hay collected from each padi lot. The hay is then transported to their processing center where hay is feed to special cows which then turn the hay into manure. The cows are yellowish and imported from China. Watanwajaya has a breeding program and has plans to breed more cows to be distributed to padi farmers through the local farmers' association. There are plans also to use goats.

Watanwaja will provide the farmers with the hay to feed the cows and goats, and in return the farmers will buy the animal dung from them for their fertilizer processing.

With this program, it is expected that 80% of the hay will be used to process into fertilizers and 20% will be left at the padi fields for compost. Open burning will drastically be reduced.

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

sounds like a great arrangement... and certainly beats polluting the air...