Additive to cow feed said to benefit farms, environment

Tag : feed product

NUVAC Sciences de la vie, a Canadian company represented in Vermontby the nonprofit Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont,says it has developed natural bacterial products that can boostfarm income and help the environment by reducing the phosphorusrunoff from farms.
NUVAC President Noel Gauthier, accompanied by members of hisscientific staff, made the claims Thursday at the Carman Brook Farmin Highgate, owned by Daniel and Karen Fortin. Governmentofficials, the head of the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery andothers attended the briefing.
Gauthier and Bill Zuccareno of the development council supportedthe company's claims with pages of data detailing increases inbutterfat, protein and volume for dairy cows using BoviPlex, a feedadditive, and they had additional data showing that MaxiCharge,applied to manure pits, speeds the "aerobic digestion" of manuresolids, eating it like "Pacman," as Gauthier put it.
Gauthier said patents for the process of growing the bacteria arepending in the United States and Canada. The ingredients areapproved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United Statesand by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Jury still out


Agriculture Secretary Roger Albee said the presentation at CarmanBrook Farm was interesting, but he wasn't prepared to accept theclaims uncritically.
"There are a lot of these products on the market," he said. "A lothave been used in the hog industry in the Midwest for smell, but weneed to ask scientific questions over time. What does it do? What'sthe cost? What's the benefit to water quality as well as to theproducers who use any product?"
He said his department's scientific staff and scientists from theAgency of Natural Resources would meet with the technical stafffrom NUVAC and evaluate the company's data.
The evaluation process, he said, could take up to a year and ahalf.

In the meantime, Albee said, his department would make no objectionto farm trials of the products.
Leon Berthiaume, general manager of the St. Albans Creamery Co-opwith 500 dairy farmer members, said that if the product lives up toNUVAC's claims, it would "hit the bottom line immediately" fordairy farmers.
Berthiaume, too, said he couldn't make a judgment on the productbefore looking more closely at the company's data and watching howthe products worked in trials. "We need to get into this a littlemore," he said.
Berthiaume said he would pass on what he had heard to the co-op'sboard.

He said he isn't prepared to offer an endorsement. "I'm not sureI'm there yet," he said. "There are questions on the herd healthside, on impacts on production. We need to understand all thoseelements to know the economic impact it can have on the farm."
Some farmers sold


Steve Reed, manager of the Sunset Lake Farm in Alburgh,participated in a three-month free trial of the products fromDecember to March.
"I do think it works," he said. "I know it works in the (manure)pit. You could see it. It was easier to stir, and I did gain milkproduction, butterfat and protein. When we went off it, I lostbutterfat and protein."
Milk prices are determined by volume and the butterfat and proteincontent of the milk.

Reed said NUVAC's data showed he gained seven pounds in dailyproduction from the 425 Holsteins in the test. Since the testended, he said, production has declined by three pounds a day percow. "We did have a control group that has stayed consistent," hesaid.
He said he has no way yet to assess whether the liquefied manure hespread on his 700 acres is utilized as fertilizer more effectivelyby crops.

Reed calculated that the cost of the product could be recovered ifdaily milk production increased by about 1 1/2 pounds per cow,though so many factors entered into milk and crop production it wasdifficult to attribute changes to one cause. But he was convincedthat MaxiCharge had worked in the manure pit. "That was a bigplus," he said. "No crust on top of the pit.
"I'm still interested in trying the product full time," he said. "Ibelieve that it works. Nothing at all negative. The cows seemhealthier. I'm not a true believer yet that it works to what theirstudies say it works."
Zuccareno, from the development council, which has a contractualrelationship with NUVAC, said the company estimates that treatingthe two-million-gallon manure pit at the Carman Brook could be donewith two treatments a year, at $574 a treatment.
He said a food additive trial on a New Hampshire farm with 50Jersey cow used nine $200 bags of food additive over three months-- a $7,200 annual cost.
"I was skeptical at the beginning," Zuccareno said. "They've got ahigh mountain to climb to persuade a lot of people who have seenother products that just didn't live up to they way they wereportrayed. But they've really done their homework. I haven't comeacross anyone else who has the data."
Connie Stanley-Little, the director of the development council,said the council, after waiting to see company trial results, hasnow worked on the project for nine months.
"If it works, it would work in our cows and sewers," she said.

She said the ability of MaxiCharge to reduce waste solids couldsave area towns a third of what they pay to truck the solids away.On the farm, it would give more discretionary income to farmers andreduce phosphorus run-off into Lake Champlain.
"We weren't going to come out and say anything until we had thescientific data," she said. "It's not the end-all. It's just onetool in the tool box. More testing is always good. I do feelconfident that tests will show it's an effective product."
Contact John Briggs at 660-1863 or jbriggs@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com