Waste milk into digester

mawleymoos · Feb 24, 2018

just wondering if anyone feeds their digester waste milk? And does anyone know it’s methane potential!! Also skim milk methane potential!! At the moment we feed waste milk to bull calves and from time to time put skim into the slurry! (Christmas and fruit season) and would like to try and work out what it is worth in the digester!! I would be most grateful If anyone has a link or some info!!
Many thanks

sjt01 · Feb 24, 2018

We put a couple of tonnes of whey from our cheesemaking into the digester twice a week, seems to quite like it. The only things to watch are shock loading and the total solids content of the digester getting diluted. The digester commissioned before ours was fed a couple of tonnes of outdated cream from supermarkets, and got a rather upset stomach - pH plummeted

mawleymoos · Feb 24, 2018

Would whey be different to milk or skim? Does anybody have any figures? The problem is, is that it isn’t a common feed stock!!

sjt01 · Feb 24, 2018

mawleymoos said:
Would whey be different to milk or skim? Does anybody have any figures? The problem is, is that it isn’t a common feed stock!!

Whole milk will have lactose, and a lot more fat and protein than whey. You get about a kilo of cheese from 10 litres of milk

e3120 · Feb 24, 2018

mawleymoos said:
just wondering if anyone feeds their digester waste milk? And does anyone know it’s methane potential!! Also skim milk methane potential!! At the moment we feed waste milk to bull calves and from time to time put skim into the slurry! (Christmas and fruit season) and would like to try and work out what it is worth in the digester!! I would be most grateful If anyone has a link or some info!!
Many thanks

I'll spin it around and ask why you don't feed it to heifer calves. If you're concerned about upsetting their stomachs with what's in it, then digester bacteria are unlikely to fair well either.

As a bull calf buyer, filling them with waste milk is a pet hate as a puppy-fat, immunity-compromised calf is not well-prepared for life in my system where they'll soon encounter a myriad of bugs from the wide variety of source farms/marts.

mawleymoos · Feb 24, 2018

Personally I don’t see any difference in feeding our bull calves with waste milk and our heifers with milk powder! (Only for johnes risk)The only downside is running two separate groups! I am not talking large volumes to shock the digester, I just want to put a value on it! I might send some samples to livelab if there is no standard values!

Waste milk into digester

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