- By entering basic farm information such as animal numbers, yard and roof areas that capture rainfall, and housing periods, the AHDB wizard calculates the volume of slurry that the farm will produce on a monthly basis
This data, together with the farm’s current slurry storage capacity, is used to calculate how long it takes to fill the available storage and whether more capacity is needed.
It calculates the total amount of nitrogen produced to allow those farming within an NVZ to meet the obligation to stay beneath the required threshold. The wizard explores the potential impact and cost from changes to infrastructure such as redirecting rainwater, roofing dirty yards, increasing storage capacity or installing a slurry separator and provides a cost/benefit analysis for fitting rainwater goods to redirect clean water and covering dirty yards .
It is also able to understand the impact of changes such as increases in herd size, moving from straw yards to cubicles, introducing outside loafing areas, changes to the housing period and dirty water management can be quantified.
Recent changes to the wizard include more accurate rainfall data. The rainfall data that has been incorporated into this version of the Slurry Wizard tool uses the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s Gridded Estimates of Areal Rainfall (GEAR) 1km dataset, which covers the whole of the UK. To access this data the farm location needs to be identified with a 10-figure grid reference.
Another enhancement makes it much easier for pig farmers to account for the slurry and wash water produced on their farms to be accounted for. A wider range of available bank slopes for earth-banked slurry stores and the ability to incorporate slurry bags has also been added.
Related news:
