Air scrubbing technology comes to county

Reicks View Farms has brought a new technology of odor control to their swine confinement facility at 3030 120th Street, Lawler.Dale Reicks and his employees were excited to be showing off state of the art Air Scrubber Technology that is one of the latest technologies in feed delivery, climate control and odor reduction.This is a new, experimental procedure that Dale Reicks first heard about when in Europe.“It isn’t a new process, just new to the states,” said Reicks.He first looked into the process in Belgium in 2007 and wanted to learn how they did it.“I learned a lot there,” said Reicks. He went to Germany in 2012 and again saw more air scrubbing technology and again researched how they built and ran their facilities.“The buildings were essentially pulling air through a filter, mixing it with water and then putting it in a water containment unit on its way out,” said Reicks.Wet scrubbers are used on ventilation air as it exits livestock housing. They use liquid to collect dust or particulate matter and absorb gases from air by using a wet surface, spray system or wet material bed.Some scrubbers use water which is partially recirculated, while others use some type of acid or base to shift the pH in order to absorb specific gases in the air. The liquid effluent then has to be treated as a waste product.  Reicks first tried this new technology on a building located on a farm of theirs about two years ago and learned that the pH levels in the water were getting too high.“We decided to use citric acid to right the problem,” said Reicks. They learned from that first trial and knew what they would need to watch for in this next building.Reicks’ new building and employees are working to know what effectiveness this air scrubbing filter will have on the air coming in and out of the facility.For the complete story see the 9/27/2016 New Hampton Tribune