Peanut Shell Is Useful

There are plenty of peanut shell in our country, but with the exception of a few is used as fuel and roughage, most of them are thrown away without getting reasonable use. Actually the peanut shell is very useful, domestic and overseas many scientific researchers have been doing researches on comprehensive development and utilization of peanut shells in recent years, and have obtained great progress and acquired a certain economic benefits. Below we are talking about the application of peanut shells.

Peanut shells can be used as fertilizer. It contains nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, Zn, Mg, Fe and other element, can be used as the fertilizer for growth of a plant, but because peanut shells decay slowly and difficult to be used by plant directly, people in the vast rural regions treat it as waste and throw away. We can break it to pieces and stir in some chemical additives such as urea or cow muck, then heap a pile to retting fermentation decomposition, by the action of bacteria, decompose for 5-7 days and we can get high quality organic fertilizer whose effectiveness is better than fertilizer that made of bagasse and straw. In addition, we also can smash peanut shell and damage its fiber with chemical method, then soak the peanut shell flakes in liquid that mixed with ammonia, phosphorus, potassium inorganic fertilizer and rich organic production waste liquid; soak the flakes in liquid contains a lot of lignin extracted from peanut shells with dried fruits and nuts. Finally a wrap will formed outside peanut shell flakes after drying, and then we obtain the long-term slow-release fertilizer.

After microbial process, nutritional value and the digestion rate of peanut shells are greatly enhanced, suitable to used as feed by certain scale farm, dry matter accounted for 90.3% of peanut shells nutrients, of which 4.8%-7.2% is crude protein, 1%-1.1% is crude fat, 65.7%-79.3% is coarse cellulose and 10.1% is hemicellulose, soluble carbohydrate is 10.6%-21.2%, crude ash is 1.9%-4.6%, calcium is 0.24%-0.27%, phosphorus is 0.08%-0.09%, the dry matter per kilogram contains digestible energy 4605-5.108 KJ for cow, 4438-4.898 KJ for sheep, including digestible protein as 15-17 grams/kg, and peanut shells also contain vitamin and minerals and part of the amino acid. Microbial fermentation is needed in order to make peanut shells into feed. Air to 60 centigrade or so after crush and stew the peanut shells, add 1% of dry yeast powder and decomposing bacteria to ferment in the fermentation pool. Four days later sifting fermented peanut shells, flakes have broken down into fine powder can be used as the cattle feed.

Peanut shells can be used as training base of edible fungi such as mushrooms, straw mushrooms, shitake and so on. According to the report, in cultivating edible seedlings, its yield is as twice as wood chips, chaff and straw. And the nutrient in edible fungus, rough fiber content and protein content all is a plus with peanut shell.