A new fertilizer made from turkey feathers provides an environmentally friendly solution for keeping the “green” in putting greens.

The environment and the putting greens at some of the top golf courses in the United States will be benefiting from an unusual ingredient: turkey feathers.

In searching for a valuable use for a waste product of Cargill’s turkey processing plants, a Cargill team led by Dr. H.S. Muralidhara developed a premium, organic fertilizer for putting greens. Feathers, it turns out, are full of nitrogen — the element that puts the green in putting greens. Grinding the turkey feathers to an optimal size means that the nitrogen is released slowly, minimizing the chances for excess soil nutrients.

Cargill's Dr. Murali led the fertilizer development team.

Another key aspect of the product is that it is organic. Organically derived fertilizer is a hot topic for research,” says Dr. John Cisar, professor of Turfgrass Management at the University of Florida in Fort Lauderdale. “Legal restrictions, high prices for petroleum-based fertilizers and consumer perception all make organic fertilizers desirable.”

Cisar, who has provided advice to Cargill on the product, has an experimental putting green. His experiments show that the fertilizer prevents the application of excess nitrogen compared to conventional fertilizers. By releasing nitrogen slowly, the turkey-feather product allows the grass to absorb all the nutrients. It also offers better performance: slow-release nitrogen is key to achieving a vibrant green color without burning.

Dr. John Cisar (kneeling) of the University of Florida with Cargill's Darrell Chenault and Dr. Murali.

Innovation hatches a business

H.S. Muralidhara — better known within Cargill as Dr. Murali — runs the Process Technology Group in Corporate Plant Operations. His team likes to refer to it as “the skunk works” because of the group’s free-flowing approach to innovation. Starting with essentially a waste product that went to rendering or was buried in landfills, Murali and co-inventor Darrell Chenault came up with an application for some of the most valuable turf in the United States. The success of golf courses can rise and fall on the quality of its putting surfaces.

Back in 2000, Cargill’s turkey business started to look for ways to get more value from the feathers. “We knew that the feathers were full of protein, so we asked ourselves if there wasn’t something we could do with them,” says Andy Southerly, Cargill’s whole bird business manager. They contacted Murali’s group and asked them to look at the problem.

A breakthrough came with the realization that the amino acids in protein contain nitrogen — a key component of fertilizer. Bringing piles of wet feathers into the lab, Murali’s team discovered that a simple chemical process could chop long protein chains into smaller molecules called peptones. Feathers are 80 percent protein, so Murali turned to his specialty — membrane separation — to remove impurities and collect the peptones.

The end result was a free-flowing product that looked like gray sand and had a faint barnyard aroma.

Demonstration plant

In January 2008, Cargill opened a demonstration plant in Waco, Texas, (site of a Cargill turkey processing plant) to produce the turkey-feather fertilizer. Trials of the product produced exhilarating results. To sell the product, Cargill has partnered with Organic Laboratories, one of the country’s leading producers and marketers of earth-friendly pesticides and fertilizers. Organic Laboratories is marketing the fertilizer under its brand name Pure Gro™, offering it in the organic agriculture, organic lawn care, sports turf/golf course, and retail lawn and garden markets. Its Pure Gro™ is the world's first organic fertilizer that can be applied both as dry granules or sprayed as a foliar liquid.

So far, Organic Laboratories is selling all the Pure Gro™ biofertilizer it acquires from Cargill. If demand turns global, Cargill does chicken processing in Canada, Europe, Asia and South America — and chicken feathers work just as well as turkey feathers.