With the development of intensive and large-size livestock farming, a large amount of livestock manure has brought environmental pollution in some areas. Aerobic composting is a widely-used and efficient technology for the treatment and utilization of organic waste, which realizes harmless treatment, quantity reduction, stabilization and reutilization. However, there are several issues such as low maturity degree of compost product and emission of polluting gases during the process of composting, moisture content (MC) is one of the most important factors of composting. In order to study the effects of initial MC on maturity and pollution gas emissions during the sheep manure composting and optimize the process conditions, an experiment was carried out in 60 L sealed fermenters for 35 days. In this research, sheep manure and cornstalk were used as raw composting materials. According to the different initial MC, high-humidity sheep manure without any cornstalk was set as MC75 treatment, cornstalks were thoroughly mixed with sheep manure in certain proportions to adjust the initial MC to be 70%, 65%, 60% and 55%, respectively. C/N ratio of the composting mixture of five treatments was adjusted to 22 approximately by adding urea. The chemical and physical characters and maturity indicators such as temperature, germination index, electric conductivity, and pH value were analyzed, and continuous monitoring of pollution gases (CH4, N2O, and NH3) were conducted. The results demonstrated that the sheep manure composting pile with the MC of 75% could not be activated successfully, the compost product still had the risk in farmland utilization because it did not experience the thermophilic period (>50℃). However, lots of greenhouse gases such as CH4 and N2O were released and the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent was the largest among all treatments during the experiment (41.4 g/kg). While the co-composting process could be started effectively for all treatments with sheep dung and cornstalks. MC70%, 65%, 60% and 55% treatments all entered into thermophilic stage and reached the peak values of temperature on the 2nd and 4th day, respectively. The thermophilic phase lasted for 8-10 d to reach the compost sanitary requirements. Moreover, the germination index of all treatments under the addition of cornstalks were higher than 80%, the electric conductivities were below 4 mS/cm and the pH values were in the range of 8 to 9 at the end of composting, which could be biologically non-toxic and meet the maturity standard completely. The treatment with the initial MC of 65% had long thermophilic phase (10 d) and high biodegradation degree, whose degradation rate of dry material reached 45%. Meanwhile, compared to the other treatments, the total nitrogen loss and the total greenhouse effects were decreased by 4.81%-16.99% and 7.56%-48.62%, respectively. Consequently, sheep manure with high moisture content should be collected and disposed frequently in sheep farming, and it is not environmentally friendly to pile up without any bulking agent. The optimal initial moisture content is about 65% in this study during the aerobic co-composting of sheep manure and cornstalk. In addition, the control of ammonia emissions by adding additives could be taken into account in future research. © 2020, Editorial Department of the Transactions of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering. All right reserved.
