Forecasting negative consequences of manure handling practices: case of outer air

Abstract

Agricultural production is an economic activity that has a significant impact on the atmosphere. The distributed pollution sources and a wide variety of agricultural practices and facilities present challenges to an accurate inventory of harmful emissions from agriculture. The ongoing farming capacity building and construction of new livestock and poultry complexes make it a very important issue to address. According to previous studies, the main emission source here is animal manure handling. The study aimed to establish a forecast model of the adverse effect of manure handling technologies on the outer air. The logico-linguistic modelling was applied for this purpose (Spesivtsev-Drozdov approach). It allowed formalising the expert judgements into the analytical expressions of the polynomial type. The study identified four relevant dominant factors: X1manure processing technology; X2gas emission treatment technology; X3agro-technical and agro-ecological requirements; and X4digitalisation. The factor analysis revealed Factor X2 with a weight coefficient of 0.5 and Factor X1 with a weight coefficient of 0.3 to be the most significant ones. The resulting polynomial expressions forming the model were checked for adequacy by finding the correlation of expert and calculated estimates. The correlation coefficients were 98.65% and 96.6%, respectively, indicating a high agreement degree. In practice, the designed model can be an effective tool in decision-making related to choosing the relevant abatement measures and the upgrading options of agricultural enterprises based on the forecasts of their environmental impact depending on different technological and management solutions.