hard roads, easy fix

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Published July 11, 2011, 05:47 AM

Hard roads, easy fixBUFFALO, N.D. It sounds almost too good to be true an enzyme promoted to improve road beds.

By: Mikkel Pates , Agweek

BUFFALO, N.D. It sounds almost too good to be true an enzyme promoted to improve road beds.

Bob Johnson, senior adviser/road specialist for Pacific Enzymes Inc., says it works this way. You take those tough-to-maintain, bubbling rural roads orsoft-from-being-wet spots in farm yards that boil up in spring. You work them up and spray with Permazyme 11X, an enzyme a food-based living bug thatbinds clay particles. You pack the soil to 8 inches and almost immediately enjoy a fine, rehabilitated road.

Jerry Melvin, a farmer and commodity trading businessman in Buffalo, N.D., in western Cass County, says when he heard about Permazyme, he jumped atthe opportunity to host a demonstration of the product at his farmstead. He and his wife, Hattie, and sons, Jonathon and Randy, base their farming and graintrading operations.

The Melvins hosted a group of about 40 people to hear Johnson and others talk about the product and what the product and process can do. Melvin says heis interested in the topic because his own farm yard has huge soft spots and the country roads all over the country are falling apart.

Our rural roads are shot, Melvin says. Thats happening everywhere.

Bad roads cost farmers money and down time with delayed or destroyed farm equipment and vehicles. Nothing else seems to work, so a product that has atrack record elsewhere is worth considering, he says.

Accidental discovery

Johnson spent a week in the Buffalo, N.D., area, preparing for the Melvin demonstrations, which drew several highway officials from North Dakota andMinnesota.

Johnson says the enzymes use for road improvement is more than 40 years old. It is manufactured by a Las Vegas-based company called InternationalEnzymes, which was created in 1969 by John Bottistoni of Fresno, Calif.

The Bottistonis were hog farmers. They discovered that the feed material they were feeding their hogs would ferment the soil and soil would get very hardfrom the foodstuffs. They recreated the food materials and created an enzyme that would solidify clay.

Bottistoni owns 51 percent of International Enzymes. The family created a separate, companion company called Pacific Enzymes at about the same time.Pacific Enzymes is owned by the family of Beth Henning, now 92, who also owns 49 percent of International Enzymes.

Some of the enzymes were used to put on a sewage lagoon, to help it crust over and prevent smells.

Their primary goal, initially, was to make an enzyme that would loosen the soil, to allow plants to grab nutrients, he says. The company in fact sells a product

called Agzyme for that purpose. Permazyme was designed to do the opposite turn the soil harder.

Permazyme has been promoted commercially for road construction since about 1978, but before this, never in North Dakota.

Farmer, road specialist

Johnson found out about the product when he worked for the Glenn County, Calif., road department. He worked there from 1987 to 2008 and retired as roadsuperintendent. He lives in Chico, Calif., north of Sacramento, Calif., and does some part-time farming with 25 purebred Limousin cows.

I started using Permazyme in 1998, mainly to solidify our clay (road) problem, he says.

The roads were treated and left as a gravel surface, while others were covered with a chip-seal cover.

We were looking for something to stabilize the clay. We tried everything conventional cement, asphalt emulsions, lime treatment, he says.

The clay is so deep that its like building a road over a marsh, Johnson says. The clay is 20 feet deep in places. The county grows rice, and some of thefields are saturated for eight or nine months a year.

Permazyme seemed to be the ticket. The county applied it to more than 50 miles of road and he never had any failures, Johnson says.

Some of the countys roads needed full-depth reclamation reusing pavement, base and sub-base with stabilizers to rebuild poor roads inexpensively.The county had used various products including lime, foamed liquid asphalt and emulsion mixtures and cement treatments.

Compaction is key, he says. In California they use a sheeps-foot roller, or a vibratory pad foot.

Johnson retired from Glenn County in 2008 and immediately went to work for Pacific Enzymes, selling Permazyme throughout the country. (The county stilluses the product, using 150 gallons last year at $350 per gallon, a county official confirms.)

Fellow travelers

Also promoting on behalf of Pacific Enzymes is Maureen Clemmons, president of an innovations company she calls Transformations. Clemmons holds adoctorate in organization change from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.

Clemmons describes her business as a change-management consulting practice in Winnetka, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley west of Los Angeles.Clemmons parents are from Belfield and Bismarck in North Dakota and attended the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. (According to Pepperdine,

Clemmons once held a corporate vice president post but left to get her doctorate at Pepperdines School of Education and Psychologys OrganizationChange. She is most well-known recently for her efforts to prove that ancient kites were used to build the pyramids, and lift obelisks, even though she is not ascientist in that area.)

Clemmons was invited to UND to speak at a UND Center for Innovation conference in April 2010, when she and Bruce Gjovig, director of the center, talkedabout local North Dakota needs, including deteriorating rural roads, especially in the western part of the state in association with oil development.

d roads, easy fix http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/18742/

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Clemmons knew about Permazyme, and Gjovig arranged for a symposium and demonstration in Grand Forks in October. One of the participants was Rep.Bob Skarphol, R-Tioga. This helped induce the North Dakota Petroleum Council to fund a demonstration project of three miles on 84th Street Northwest nearWildrose, N.D., in 2010.

In that connection, Lana Rakow, a UND communications professor and director of the Center for Community Engagement, and a native of Buffalo, connectedthe project to her hometown, and to the Melvins, as a way to help solve the rural concern about roads.

Dilution factors

Permazyme is a brown liquid. Its made with feed molasses and is fermented five to nine days in a process akin to making beer. The end product is 80percent enzymes and 20 percent sugar. The enzymes are blended with a surfactant to carry the enzyme into the soil.

The concentrate is diluted in water at a ratio of no less than 500 parts of water to one part of Permazyme. The water is a carrier, Johnson says.

If the soil materials need moisture, more water can be added later, Johnson says.

Some of the ratios in his examples are as many as 1,700 gallons to one or 3,000 gallons in the high desert.

Johnson says he needs to have a minimum of 8 percent cohesive clay fines in a materials sample before the process will work. But it can be used onground asphalt. He says the clay content in roadbeds in the Red River Valley gravel roads is about 25 percent, so thats more than sufficient.

While Johnson recommends applying the material at 50 degrees and rising, he applied the material in October at 50 degrees and falling in Wildrose.

Wildrose experiment

Johnson says it was predictable that it wouldnt fully cure, but still did very well anyway in a nasty, nasty cold winter.

This road surface was treated at 10 inches deep and eventually cured in May. He says parts of the road were under water for two weeks.

Ive never experienced a road being under water for that long, and still it performed very well, he says.The North Dakota Department of Transportation engineers attending the Melvin demonstration say they are interested in the product. They told Johnsontheyd like to observe the next time the product is used and would need formal compaction tests. Bowman County, N.D., is going to order 200 gallons for ademonstration project in August, which theyll invite the DOT to observe.

The Wildrose project was a county project. Johnson says some compaction tests exist, but the department is planning to do some field tests specific to thesoils in Bowman County.

The Liberty County, Mont., highway department has been using the product for 10 years, where the road superintendent tells him frost is not a problem atall.

They look at it as a good alternative, Johnson says. Once the road is treated, theyve never added gravel again to the road and they use the materials thatare already in the road. Everyday maintenance of the road dramatically decreases. They may have been maintaining the surface 12 times a year and nowthey occasionally spot-maintain a road once or twice a yea r.

There are some scientific tests, but its not always clear that they apply.

Changing the tests?

Johnson says California State University-Chico is home to the California Pavement Preservation Center, created in 2006 to help promote the cost-effectivepreservation of pavement. Scientists there have looked at it.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has done extensive but sometimes inappropriate tests, Johnson says, in which a core of thetreated roadbed is immediately dunked into water without first allowing it curing time. The tests are called the California Bearing Ratio tests and are astandard used globally.

Having it totally submersed in water does not replicate what happens in the real world, Johnson says.

He says even agency officials acknowledge that those tests do not reflect the success theyve seen in the field, and should be modified.

Johnson thinks a demonstration project in Buffalo could be important.

He calculated the cost to Permazyme-treat the bad spots in the city of Buffalo at about $43,750. Thats 125 gallons of the concentrate at $350 each. Hethinks it might take two or three days to do the work for the entire town, going 36 feet wide. Thats compared with $285,000 for bringing 6 inches of roadgravel in 19,000 yards, at $15 a yard, delivered.

In the Wildrose project, Johnson says it took 20 gallons of Permazyme to treat a mile of road, 24 feet wide. Thats $7,000, if the $350 per gallon cost isapplied. Now, the county is going to 30 gallons to include the shoulders, which theyre recommending, because of the heavy loads and the pounding on theshoulders.

Pacific Enzymes wont sell the product to a client unless they first are trained, for a $500-per-day training fee.

No product warranty

The product carries no warranty.

If a spot needs attention, you can go in there and reactivate by spraying on an even more diluted product an inch deep, allowing the operator to reshapethe road, which then is recompacted and rehardened.

If you dont reactivate it, the road will be so hard that sparks will come off the road grader, he says. It continues to get harder, year after year, but notbrittle.

The product has a Material Safety Data Sheet government report shows no toxicity.

On black-top surfaces, the company advises renting or somehow acquiring use of a commercial pulverizer, such as the Asphalt Zipper machine.

Asphalt Zipper two representatives at the meeting in Buffalo. The Asphalt Zipper was designed in the 1990s, initially to open trenches in roads to allow thelaying of pipes. Starting in 2001, the company started selling machines specifically designed for road repair and road maintenance. They range from


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24-inches wide on a skid-steer loader 8 feet wide on a large front-end loader. The machines are provided with containment systems, and are provided withaggressive bullet-nosed carbide tips to chew the road surface to desired consistency for this purpose, pulverizing. The company has models developed toapply the Permazyme.

Johnson says one of the keys to its success is that it requires substantial compaction to start the reaction with the clay, but just how much compaction isneed is hard to define. Johnson says he maximum hes been able to compact a road is 8 inches deep without excavation.

To do it correctly, engineering testing must be done to get the curve on it, to reach optimum density on the material.

Any more than 8 inches, you have to remove the top materials to do deeper compaction, he says.

While generally complimenting road workers in a half-dozen North Dakota counties hes visited, hes noticed that few of them have compactors that penetratemore than 2 inches. Butler Machinery provided him the use of a compactor.

The road surface hardens with time and if applied under correct conditions it can even be covered with a chip-seal for a truly permanent surface.

All of this sounded interesting to Melvin, but he really is looking for answers.

Let me put it this way, Melvin says, If I have a crop out there and I cant get it off the fields because bad roads, Im done. In government, there is time tosolve problems, but I have to solve these problems for my farm.

Tags: livestock , crops , agribusiness , roads , agriculture


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