Avaliação do efeito da compostagem sobre a viabilidade de microrganismos indicadores em carcaças de bovinos

Abstract

Farmers of small and medium business, mainly cattle raisers, face difficulty to destinate the carcasses of dead animals. In many cases, this carcass are discarded in ditches, burnt, thrown in rivers or buried, without proper care, causing environmental problems. This kind of procedure may lead to contamination of pathogens to animals and even to humans. An alternative which has been adopted is composting, a biological process of organic material decomposition, by microorganisms, that recycles waste, producing a bio-compost that when properly produced can be used as input for agricultural production. In Brazil, the growth of cattle raising represents an increase in animal deaths due to natural or accidental causes. The composting of bovine carcasses aims at certifying this process efficiency in decomposing them. In this process the whole body mass occurs. Moisture and high temperature followed by aerobic natural process propitiates digestion by microorganisms. We introduced plastic spheres into the composting of animal carcasses containing lyophilized pathogen microorganisms intending to monitor the composting efficiency. The microbiological tests carried out showed that composting interferes with the presence of microorganisms, and the organic mass generated by composting presents microbiological safety, which indicates this bio composite to be used as fertilizer in agriculture.