BENEFITS FROM SPREADING WHEY ON AGRICULTURAL LAND
Kenneth S. Watson, Director of Environmental Control
Kraftco Corporation
Glenview, Illinois 60025
Arthur E. Peterson, Professor
Richard D. Powell, Soil Scientist
Department of Soil Science
College of Agriculture and Life Science
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconson 53706
INTRODUCTION
In today's era of proper concern for water pollution control, the dairy industry has
been giving attention to pollution which can be caused by whey if it is not properly
handled.   The soundest method of preventing whey from creating a pollution problem is
through processing to recover constituents for use as feed and food supplements.   Perhaps
the biggest drawback to this approach at times, however, is the fact that recovery costs
cannot be justified by the value of products recovered.
As the need increases to feed the world's burgeoning population with food of proper
nutritional character, hopefully the value of the whey solids and by-products which can
be recovered will increase and processing techniques improve so that regardless of economic conditions, there will be an attractive demand for the array of products originating
in this source.
In spite of the soundness of the approach of recovering products from whey, however,
all the nation's whey cannot be disposed of in this manner.   Small scattered cheese plants
which cannot individually, or jointly, as a result of isolation, justify expenditures for condensing and drying facilities, must have a satisfactory method of whey disposal to continue to make a vital contribution to the world's food supply.
PLANTS PRACTICING LAND DISPOSAL
The exact number of cheese plants which need to make use of land disposal of whey
to remain in operation is not accurately known.   This is particularly true of cottage
cheese plants.   Better information appears to be available for the remainder of the industry, however.
Based on information available from the Whey Products Institute [1], 23.44 billion lb
of fluid sweet-type whey was produced in the United States during the year 1972.   For
the same annual period, 4.7 billion lb of fluid acid-type whey was also produced in the
manufacture of cottage cheese.   These quantities of whey were calculated from cheese
production figures released by the Crop Reporting Board of the U.S. Department of Agriculture [2].   It is of interest that the relatively small quantity of acid whey resulting from
the production of cream cheese is included in the sweet whey total as a result of the
USDA method of classifying cheese production.
In accordance with another report of the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture [3], about 43% of the small plants (less than 2 million lb annually)
and 16% of the medium-sized plants (2 to 9.9 million lb annually), other than those producing cottage cheese, depend upon feeding and spreading on land to dispose of their
whey.   Therefore, apparently about 285 [4] plants dispose of approximately 300 million
gal of fluid, sweet whey annually by landspreading.    This means that on an average, each
Plant would dispose of whey in the range of less than 1000 to 6250 gallons per day (gpd).
Each of the approximately 45 plants classed as medium in size, which are using spreading,
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