Real-Scale Study on Methane and Carbon Dioxide Emission Reduction from Dairy Liquid Manure with the Commercial Additive SOP LAGOON
, Michele Costantini 2, Michele Zoli 2, Jacopo Bacenetti 2, Daniele Aspesi 3, Lorenzo Poggianella 4 and Marco Acutis 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript investigates the effect of a commercial product to reduce CO2 and CH4 emissions from dairy liquid manure at farm scale. This study provides effective information about the potentials of the SOP LAGOON additive on greenhouse gas emissions abatement. The most interesting point of the study lies in the act that was carried out at the farm scale providing more realistic data compared to laboratory-scale experiments. From my point of view, the manuscript is well written, tables and figures are clear and discussions/conclusions provides enough information to understand the most relevant findings. There are a few points that needs some clarifications/corrections in order to improve the readability of the manuscript. For these reason my suggestion is to accept the manuscript after minor revision.
Following you can find the detailed list of my comments:
Please check the editing, abbreviations and language errors (i.e. line 47: “CH4”; line 286: “greenhouse gas”). Somewhere in the manuscript author reported (i.e.) “methane” instead of “CH4” or “ammonia” instead of “NH3” and I’d like to ask to correct this.
Line 20 - 21: Please correct “Carbon Based Green House Gas (GHG)” with “Carbon Based greenhouse gas (GHG)”
Line 131 – 134: I am a little bit confused about the description of product application. Did the authors added 40 kg of product each week per 4 weeks (total of 160 kg of product) or the 40 kg are referred to the entire period of 4 weeks? Perhaps this part should be rewritten.
Line 138 – 147: I suggest to include one reference to Tab. 1
Line 145: Please add the reference method
Line 183 – 189: Please include the resolution and accuracy of the gas analyser (ETG FTIR 9500) for each gas
Line 223 – 224: Can be removed
Line 362: Please correct “Holly et al” with the journal citation guidelines
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
thank you for your submission.
Proofreading from a native speaker is advised.
Overall, the manuscript was well presented, however you mention that the differences are due to microbial changes. Shouldn't you expand further on that and maybe add some tests to verify this?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors of the article presented studies on the ability of the commercial product SOP LAGOON added to liquid manure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The research was carried out in two liquid manure tanks. The test additive SOP LAGOON was added to one of them and the other was treated as a reference tank.
Comments:
1. Page 1, lines 36-38 – there is no information that the temperature increase of 1.5 degrees is given relative to the preindustrial level.
2. Page 2, lines 57-58 – we are currently in 2022, so this law has already been implemented.
3. Page 2, lines 57-58 – these data are from 2004 and 2006. Have the authors tried to access more recent data?
4. Page 2, line 75 – literature should not be referred to in this way at the beginning of a sentence. Should be "Amon et al. [19] reported". This remark applies to many sentences in the article.
5. Page 5, line 208, page 7, figures 3 and 4 – the GHG flux unit should be written in this form: "mg/m2/h".
6. Pages 6,7, figures 2,3 and 4 – the authors wrote that the studies were conducted for 4 months. However, in the figures, the last date on the x-axis is: 7/09/2021. In this case, the one-month interval between measurements was not maintained.
7. Page 7, figure 4 – what influenced such a large standard error of the measurements for the second study? In other measurements, this error is much smaller.
8. Page 9, line 325 – it should be "[44-46]".
9. Page 12, line 4865 – it should be "Livestock".
Therefore, I suggest to accept the paper for publication in Sustainability after following major corrections.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the comprehensive response to comments and questions included in the review. The previous version of the article was re-edited according to reviewers comments and suggestions. Since the authors took all remarks included in my review into consideration and added new valuable comments into the text I recommend the presented manuscript for publication in Sustainability.
