Using wine/fruit presses for fertilizer production
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Hi everyone,
We recently completed our first harvest from our algae farm. We're growing Laminaria ochroleuca, Laminaria hyperborea, and Saccharina latissima (brown kelp species).
Our goal is to produce a liquid fertilizer from the fresh algae. For now, we're starting small-scale – just testing the process before scaling up.
We plan to:
Chop the fresh algae
Press it to separate the sap (liquid fertilizer) from the solid press cake
Preserve the sap with citric acid or potassium sorbate
Dry the press cake for further processing (powder, pellets, etc.)
Our question:
Has anyone here used wine presses or fruit presses for pressing algae? We're looking at a manual prensa de lagar (wine press) for our first tests.
Does it work well with fresh, wet algae?
Is the pressure sufficient to break open the cell walls?
Any tips or things we should watch out for?
We've read that screw presses are ideal for larger volumes, but for now we want to keep it low-budget and start with a manual press.
Any advice, experiences, or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance
@nora_22 We are using a fruit screw press to extract biostimulant from Sargassum and you really need to crank it down to get the liquid and so think a manual version will not be very effective. The press we are using is fairly inexpensive (~120 USD) and can process several kilos of biomass at a time (closer to 1 kg for the 9 L size we use). You will want to thoroughly mix all the fractions as you will notice the color and viscosity is different between the first and second pressings (we did 2 pressings) and it will separate upon sitting. Hope that helps!
Best wishes,
Loretta
@nora_22 I'm tagging a few people who may have insights, given some recent work with screw presses in the Northeast and Alaska. @toby_sheppardbloch @lindsay_olsen @spencer_serin: Any insights you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
@nora_22 we've done it for kelp. We used the model where water is added to fill the bladder and maximize press, not a manual screw one. A bit time consuming for the clean up in between batches but definitely an option. I suggest adding some warm water right before pressing to really maximize extract. But I've seen it work with some success. Hit me up if you have any questions- spencer@scrcconsult.ca
@nora_22 Goal is to break cell walls to release contents--so some sort of hydrolysis (enzymatic, acid or alkaline) before pressing will yield the richest liquid fraction. Warm or hot water will also assist. Regardless of method titrate some different concentrations--the more gentle the extraction the higher recovery of bioactive compounds.