ABOUT US continued...
Here's the good news: our system achieves significant reductions – as much as 80 % – in the amount of nitrogen and phosphate-containing solids entering the lagoon. We do not yet capture 100% of the waste as specified by EST (environmentally superior technology). But what we have achieved to date is the most significant advancement in achieving total waste elimination and the creation of “lagoon-less” hog, dairy, and feedlot operations in an economically viable way for individual farms.

We are continuing to develop our system to include a water-cleaning technology that should, for the first time ever, demonstrate the technical and economic viability of protecting the environment from any potential waste spillage by eliminating farm lagoons.

Although NatureWorks Organics was founded to market our remediation system (focusing on its value as an Environmentally Superior Technology), we quickly discovered the value – and the desirability – of the earthworm castings as a natural byproduct of this remediation process.

These castings demonstrate phenomenal performance in research and in the field. And the list of attributes seems to grow with every research study! They are not harmful to animals or the environment – and they are highly beneficial to plant growth. In fact, the basic castings product alone can perform the work of many other traditional plant growth products, most of which are petro-chemical based. For more information, see Products.

A LITTLE HISTORY
It has always been a challenge to produce more food on existing land to meet the needs of a growing population without creating greater risks for the environment. There are many examples of man-made fertilizers and insecticides whose use was banned, as the negative impact of those chemicals far outweighed the benefits they offered.

And then there's animal waste, which is another area of potential environmental impact.

Take hog farms, for example. Due to fears over potential environmental damage from the hog waste stored in lagoons on farms, several years ago the State of North Carolina placed a moratorium on new hog farms and expansion of existing farms.

That's not to say that folks didn't try to solve the problem. In 2000, a consortium of hog farmers (Frontline Farmers) and Smithfield Foods came to an agreement with the Attorney General of North Carolina to adopt any Environmentally Superior Technology (EST) that would make it technologically and economically feasible to create a “closed-loop” waste system without requiring a lagoon. See Smithfield Agreement .

Since that agreement, millions of dollars in government funding were spent to develop several technologies that have been approved as technologically viable. However, none demonstrated economic feasibility.

In 2003, the EPA created its own national guidelines for protecting the nation's estuaries from animal waste runoff. It set standards for containing rainwater during significant weather events for roughly 15,500 swine farms, dairy farms, and feedlots nationwide. These CAFOs ( Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations ) were designated for monitoring and possible future regulation based on the number of animals located at each facility … and the fact that animals are confined to a relatively small area rather than being grazed or free-range.

Most, if not all, North Carolina hog farms are in compliance with current EPA regulations. While their threat to the environment is debatable, organizations continue working to minimize or eliminate any potential threat. And the best way is to eliminate the storage and spreading of the waste generated by CAFOs.

What was needed was a system that could consistently remediate all the waste produced at a CAFO … in other words, thousands of pounds of waste per farm PER DAY.

And that's where NatureWorks Organics comes in!