Yan Chen


Utrient



Type



Product-Service System



Role



Research

Ideation

Prototyping

System design

Business model

Website design

Video production



Collaborators



Harvey Jones

Marcus Comaschi

Christian Domelh



Research Concept Development Outcome



Year



2018


TIME

3 months



Utrient diverts the lifecycle of livestock manure from polluting water sources to cultivating high value bio-products.

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2 in 3 pollution cases in watercourses in England and Wales are from agricultural sources. The livestock sector is estimated to be the biggest sectoral contributor to water pollution globally, with over 13 million tonnes of manure produced per year from dairy cattle alone. When improperly managed, the chemicals and pathogens from livestock waste can enter our water sources, posing health risks and causing environmental damage.



Research



Primary research with farmers, water companies, and water management experts.
Secondary research on context and technologies, and market research to understand solution landscape



A map of our research and concept development journey



While need-finding around resource conservation using natural mechanisms, our team decided to focus on water use in agriculture because of its largely ignored impact on water scarcity.





A presentation about our primary research with farmers and secondary research about water systems and solutions.



To understand the current landscape and find a unique point of view in the crowded field of agricultural technologies, we interviewed international experts, scoured academic journals and international agency reports, identified major trends and weak signals, and mapped out a range of existing solutions from classic methods to more innovative methods.





Map of water suppliers in the UK overlaid by dairy cattle density



Water companies that prevent water pollution at source spends, on average, one-sixth of the cost that would be required for more traditional, expensive engineering solutions. However, farmers are not incentivized to spend the resources to adopt better slurry management schemes which may require prohibitively expensive equipment, complex operations, and increased labor needs.


A dairy farm proximate to a crop farm could offload their herd's manure and slurry to the crop farmer for fertilizer. However, this could cause runoffs that contaminate groundwater with excess nutrients. Additionally, many dairy farms are concentrated in the west of England while crop farms are concentrated in the east, so it is difficult for most farmers to make this exchange.



Concept development



Synthesizing research insights into data points for ideation and prototyping a holistic system



Rapid ideation sessions quickly generated a large amount of ideas



Growing spirulina and building test rigs for filters and bioreactors



Rapid prototypes and test rigs for each stage of the system



Outcome



A system that benefits multiple stakeholders in UK's agricultural ecosystem and the planet



An end to end overview of the system



Utrient automates most of the slurry to algae process and manages the upkeep so that dairy farmers have minimal additional work.


For efficient deployment, Utrient offers its system to water companies as a water pollution management system for their catchment. For water companies, Utrient enables in situ & timely treatment of agricultural nutrients before they become difficult to manage as pollution, potentially saving millions in treatment costs & fines.


For farmers, this solves the problem of capital investment in new equipment for cleaner farming practices, provides additional income by facilitating new revenue streams, and makes them eligible for new subsidies that reward farming practices with environmental benefits that will begin in 2021.






How the Utrient system might be installed on a farm



Utrient's bioreactors are modular to accommodate changes in herd size. Farmers can produce their own microalgae and use their harvest as feed at a lower cost than if purchased from the market.





Utrient system diagram



This circular, self-sustaining system requires minimal labour and resource input, and produces zero waste.


While preparing the digestate for the bioreactors, Utrient's separator extracts the fiber (solids) from the filtrate (liquids). The filtrate is disinfected and used to cultivate algae.







Processed products in branded packaging



Utrient processes and packages the algae into feed supplements (Mootrients), the fiber into crop fertilizer, and excess filtrate into liquid nutrients. All products can be ordered from our e-commerce platform and delivered to farms across the country.


Not only would Utrient's organic fertilizer save water, CO2 emissions and oil compared to artificial fertilizer, but it contains more fibers that increase humus content and quality of soil (i.e. lignin and cellulose), higher concentrations of plant-available nitrogen and phosphorus compared to as-excreted manure, while minimizing odors and dangerous gases.







A diagram of the interactions between key stakeholders and Utrient's system and platform



This system & platform diagram maps out all the interactions between Utrient and key stakeholders from the B2B stage, centering around Utrient’s system (diverting lifecycle of slurry into algae production), to the B2C stage, centering around Utrient’s platform (distributing nutrients to all types of farms).








Farmer's dashboard



Farmers can monitor the wellbeing of various components via a system dashboard. This data is also connected to Utrient's central system which would alert both the farmer and Utrient service agents should any component require attention.


Utrient’s central dashboard also connects with the online shop to predict the supply and demand of organic nutrients across the UK, allocating logistics accordingly and localizing resource distribution with decreased carbon footprint.






Scale models to represent each step of the system, including a separator, four stages of filtration, a UV disinfectant module, a bioreactor housing module, and a 1:4 model of a flat-panel bioreactor. Vials displaying slurry filtrate and fiber, algae culture, filtered water, and processed algae tablets are displayed beside each corresponding stage.