Ammonia and greenhouse gas emissions from slatted dairy barn floors cleaned by robotic scrapers

Abstract

The design of animal housing and manure management systems are key factors in livestock farming. Frequent removal methods, in fact, allow for the reduction of gasses produced from fermentations of the organic matter contained in manure, that affect animal welfare and farmer health and are emitted from animal housings into the atmosphere as a consequence of ventilation. The present study aims to evaluate the performance of a Robotic Scraper (RS) operating on the floors in a full-scale, operative free-stall dairy barn. The research is focused on the evaluation of gaseous emissions from the two types of floors (concrete and rubber mat coated), and with and without RS operation. The floors with rubber coating demonstrated higher emission rates of ammonia (NH₃), carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and methane (CH₄) compared to the uncovered concrete floors, both before and after RS operations. The operation of RS, furthermore, determined significant reduction of greenhouse gasses (GHG) but did not have relevant effect in terms of NH₃ emission, which reduced only of 1.4% from concrete floors, but increase of 12.7% from rubber coated floors.