Milorganite Fertilizer Tour with Joe Lamp'l

you [Music] today I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin apparently home to the bronze funds harley-davidson the Brewers and milorganite now I don't own a motorcycle and I rarely have time to attend the sporting event but I do spend a lot of time in my garden and from time to time I use milorganite like I have for years but I know a lot of you have questions like I did about what is milorganite like what's it made of is it organic and more importantly is it safe to use in your lawn and landscape and especially your food garden so I thought it would be a good idea to come right to the source of where milorganite was invented and where it still happens today plus it's also the place you have to come to see how it's made and while we're here we'll get some answers to those tough and most common questions that we have now the best person to do that with is Jeff Spence Jeff is the sales and marketing director for milorganite hi Jeff good morning Joe and welcome to the Jones Island water reclamation facility thank you now let me ask you this first before we start our tour on how milorganite is made tell me a little bit about the company's position on stewardship and sustainability well we believe that our mission is to protect the environment in public health and so we do a number of different things to engage community and to help drive some of the core areas of our business from a participation perspective we actually engage the community by using a number of tools rain barrels rain guard systems we do a lot with green roofs to really manage water where falls so by 2035 our goal is become less dependent on traditional sources and to produce a lot of our own energy these facilities while still making a lot of milorganite absolutely so we're going to see how it's made but let's talk about that for a second let's address the elephant in the room right off the bat because a lot of people have basically a misconception that the product is really just maybe human waste in a bag two sewage sludge but let's talk about what it is and more importantly what it's not well you know it's interesting over the close to 90 years of producing the lorig and I there's always been this misperception of what milorganite is and we work to really educate people on on this whole process of not only cleaning wastewater but the making of milorganite what milorganite really is are the microbes or the bugs as we call them that are the engine to clean wastewater the waste water treatment process is really a biological process and it's those microbes or bugs that are used to consume all of the organics of material that are in wastewater and then wastewater is further treated to a point where it can be released into Lake Michigan right and so we're going to really look at the focus of the water process and how it becomes a solid and ultimately the dry granular fertilizer product that's salutely all right let's start it then thank you the waste water treatment process is a multi-step process in Milwaukee where we screen off large debris and it were a quarter of an inch or larger and then the water is placed in the settling tank or any other debris settles fats oils and grease are skimmed off then the water is placed into the secondary treatment phase that's where our microbes do their work they digest any organic materials that are still left in that water the water is then decanted over for disinfection chlorination dechlorination and then released into Lake Michigan so if we're just talking about the liquid walk me through the process of how it goes from waste water to a solid fertilizer product so what you have here are our microbes or bugs at work those billions of microbes are digesting any organic materials that are in this water once that's done they're harvested so the water is squeezed out moved out it goes into our dewatering drying facility where milorganite is made and a thickener is added to bind the bugs and then more water is squeezed out so you get to a consistency of a cardboard in terms of those bugs okay so this leads me to a question and just to recap what I think I heard you say we've got billions and billions of organisms here or bugs consuming the organic matter in the nutrients in the wastewater and then you're introducing that thickening agent so the thickening agent then is brought in and yet when will organize is classified as an organic nitrogen fertilizer so how do you had to get away with that it's the nitrogen it is considered organic yeah the process of by which the fertilizer is made is it disqualifies it as being an organic product we're adding elements to it that would not be something that you would see happen in any other organic product and so the EPA puts milorganite in its own or by assad's in its own category not necessarily an organic product but has organic constituents Jeff from what I know through cooking you have to heat food meat for example to a certain internal temperature to ensure that you've killed the pathogens it can be you sick it's the high heat that kills the pathogens is that the premise here as well that is the premise your gel I mean what we're dealing with is 12 dryers the size of buses no different than a dryer that you have at home but the temperature gets a lot warmer so we heat our dryers at a temperature of 1200 degrees the product in those dryers can get as high as about 185 degrees so you're killing off pathogens that could be harmful to public [Music] so Jeff now we've moved into one of the many labs where I know a lot of the testing is done and one of the things that I know people have a little bit of a concern about at least some people is that there may be heavy metals in the milorganite fertilizer and you can't heat that away with all the microbe activity right that's correct Jo so what's to prevent somebody upstream from introducing something into the wastewater that has heavy metals in it what are the safeguards that you put in place so I can feel confident that it's not going to be in my fertilizer great question so we have two different systems that we use to prevent that from occurring the first is monitoring industries in the area to ensure that metals that don't get treated in the biological system don't end up in this system so we have pretreatment system where the monitoring curves we actually go out on a regular basis and check out those facilities what we also do from a fertilizer standpoint is we analyze everyday production make sure that those bad actors aren't in there at levels that would be considered harmless and then there's the issue with pharmaceuticals that's as big a deal as anything else for a lot of people and it can come from anywhere so how do you safeguard those from showing up in your product the reality of this is that pharmaceuticals and household chemicals will show up in wastewater streams the systems aren't geared to handling pharmaceuticals reality is is that the pathway for contamination isn't biosolids it's typically water when you see things happening in the environment relative to changes to invertebrates it's through water not biosolids and a lot of work has been done relative to risk assessments too high exposure groups using BIOS odds homeowner using our product would not be exposed to any high risk situations so really at this point your role is to monitor it as best you can because it's so ubiquitous I mean even people to buy other organic fertilizers bomyeo feather meal I mean the animals ultimately might have been fed something with a pharmaceutical in it that ended up is fertilizer absolutely unless you cut back on those medicines or find better ways of breaking those down once they get out of our systems and breaking it down talked about the pathway from the point that it maybe enters the waste stream to the point that it ends up in our plants or in our stomachs yeah so when you use a fertilizer product in particular fertilizer like milorganite it is coming through the production systems but that fertilizer is being put on the ground with a lot of other elements what we see through research is that the uptake of those nutrients in the fertilizer and those micro impurities of the pharmaceuticals and the like they're not showing up in the plant but if it's in the water to begin with then the law separate it out it doesn't matter what you're making it could end up in the finish absolutely if it's in the water if it's in the soil profile then you run the same level of risk so but back to the the long tail or how long it takes for it to get to the finished product I mean we can pretty much draw the conclusion that we're dealing with vegetables that are safe to eat with the fertilizer absolutely one study suggests that you would need to consume over 1,200 pounds of corn a day to have an adverse effect from any minut pharmaceutical products or personal care products that might find its way into that crop Wow and it's only because we now have the ability to Tec down to that my new level to even know that absolutely and as the science continues to advance we'll find out more about what we're putting out into the environment and the best ways to control those issues so there you have it I hope that you found this video helpful in learning more about how milorganite is made as well as the safety of using the product but there's a lot more information on their website at milorganite comm and if you don't find what you're looking for right away then you should contact them directly right there as well [Music]