Ecological and Resource Recovery Approaches to Reduce the Envi

Developing integrated farming systems is critical to reducing the environmental impact of animal production. Traditionally, this has been through integrating animal and feed or plant production. But that has become increasingly difficult as agricultural production has become regionally specialized leading to the spatial separation of animal and feed production. This spatial separation has led to nutrient imbalances in watersheds and increases in nonpoint source runoff losses of nutrients to the water environment. The most common use of animal manure has been as a plant nutrient with ancillary benefits as an amendment to improve soil physical properties. Some manures have been used as an animal feed ingredient (CAST, 1996).