661: Abby Schaefer on Woodchip Bioreactors

Reducing Agricultural Nitrogen Runoff into Rivers and Oceans

In This Podcast:

Abby Schaefer didn’t know what she wanted to do when she started college, but she went with the flow and turned her love of chemistry into a career studying water as a bio-systems engineer.  Abby studies woodchip bioreactors, a relatively new technology which harnesses the power of microbes to remove excess nitrogen from agricultural waste water.  She explains what they are and how they work to prevent dangerous dead zones downstream.

Abby Schaefer is a research scientist and engineer in Michelle Soupir’s Water Quality Research Lab in the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering department at Iowa State University. Abby solves water quantity and quality problems, and loves microbes, data analysis, and programming.  She is the 2020 American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Pre-Professional Engineer of the Year, and her research was recently published in Agrosystems, Geosciences, & Environment.

Visit https://www.urbanfarm.org/2022/03/04/661-abby-shaefer/ for show notes and links.

Woodchip Bioreactors.