Antibiotics – Breaking Them Down

Ambience: Cows
When cows are treated with antibiotics, the drugs can pass into the environment through the animal’s waste products, which farmers use as fertilizer. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Knowlton: What we want to do is control the amount of antibiotics that get into the environment, because when we expose soil bacteria or bacteria in the water to low doses of antibiotic over time, we’re selecting for bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

Katharine Knowlton is a professor in the Department of Dairy Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech.

Knowlton: When we spread manure as fertilizer, that manure mostly stays in the field and some of the bacteria in that soil may become resistant to antibiotics.
My research group’s goal is to develop ways to degrade the antibiotics in manure before we spread them on the land. I think that composting is one way to break down the antibiotics before we spread the manure on the land. My research group is evaluating composting in different systems to see its effects on antibiotic content of manure.

Knowlton: What we’re hoping is to find a system of composting that other farmers can easily adopt . And again, because on a dairy farm, it’s such a small proportion of the manure that we have to worry about, it would be pretty easy for a farmer to adopt whatever manure management strategy we come up with.
So we take manure from the cow who has been sick that we know contain some antibiotics, and we compost it. And in composting, that manure is exposed to heat and some microbial activity that we believe will breakdown the antibiotics in the manure.
So when we compost manure, it’s exposed to heat and also oxygen. And those conditions alone will break down antibiotics. Also, we are encouraging a different population of bacteria in the manure, that may also have some effect on the antibiotics.

You can hear this and previous programs on our podcast. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Antibiotics - Breaking Them Down

Antibiotics in cow manure? Composting can help degrade them before they end up in fertilizer.

Air Date:03/16/2016

Scientist:

Transcript:

Antibiotics - Breaking Them Down

Ambience: Cows
When cows are treated with antibiotics, the drugs can pass into the environment through the animal's waste products, which farmers use as fertilizer. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Knowlton: What we want to do is control the amount of antibiotics that get into the environment, because when we expose soil bacteria or bacteria in the water to low doses of antibiotic over time, we're selecting for bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

Katharine Knowlton is a professor in the Department of Dairy Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech.

Knowlton: When we spread manure as fertilizer, that manure mostly stays in the field and some of the bacteria in that soil may become resistant to antibiotics.
My research group's goal is to develop ways to degrade the antibiotics in manure before we spread them on the land. I think that composting is one way to break down the antibiotics before we spread the manure on the land. My research group is evaluating composting in different systems to see its effects on antibiotic content of manure.

Knowlton: What we're hoping is to find a system of composting that other farmers can easily adopt . And again, because on a dairy farm, it's such a small proportion of the manure that we have to worry about, it would be pretty easy for a farmer to adopt whatever manure management strategy we come up with.
So we take manure from the cow who has been sick that we know contain some antibiotics, and we compost it. And in composting, that manure is exposed to heat and some microbial activity that we believe will breakdown the antibiotics in the manure.
So when we compost manure, it's exposed to heat and also oxygen. And those conditions alone will break down antibiotics. Also, we are encouraging a different population of bacteria in the manure, that may also have some effect on the antibiotics.

You can hear this and previous programs on our podcast. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.