Currently, in many cases, lagoons are rapidly becoming over-capacity, and the only way to relieve them seems to involve applying the waste- water therefrom to the adjacent fields. However, this method poses environmental and public health problems, including extremely unbearable odor, contamination of land by highly concentrated nutrients, and diseases caused by various pathogens.
There have been many efforts to reduce the environmental side-effects associated with the animal waste lagoons. U.S. Pat. No. 5,736,049 focuses on odor control by using aeration devices on top of a lagoon but does not provide further information on other environmental and health problems.