Sven Gjedde Sommer has been campaigning for environmentally friendly agriculture for more than 30 years. He has been working on converting slurry into valuable material by reusing vital nutrients in the slurry. On 24 May, he will be the first person ever to defend a doctoral thesis at The Faculty of Engineering in the University of Southern Denmark.
Sven Gjedde Sommer has devoted his entire career to making animal production in Denmark more environmentally friendly, and his work has helped to make Danish agriculture one of the cleanest in the world.
In the 1980s, Sven Gjedde Sommer was one of the first people to realise that agricultural emissions of ammonia are a major problem when it comes to the quality of our countryside. Today, it is recognised that agriculture is responsible for 90% of ammonia emissions.
Turning slurry into gold
In 2005, he was appointed as a professor of environmental technology at the University of Southern Denmark. With a twinkle in his eye, he calls himself the slurry professor. His objective was to turn slurry into gold – to develop environmental technologies to make livestock production in Denmark environmentally friendly without adversely affecting production or the farmers’ wallets.
He has been one of the foremost campaigners to ensure that harmful ammonia from slurry does not ruin our countryside. In addition, he has conducted intensive research into slurry separation to enable key substances such as nitrogen and phosphorus to be extracted and reused.
Phosphorus is a limited resource and, over time, lack of phosphorus can result in famines due to lower crop yields. Altogether, this has helped to make Denmark a world leader in sustainable fertiliser technology.
Defending his thesis
Thirty years’ work as a leading environmental campaigner is set to culminate in Sven Gjedde Sommer’s defence of his doctoral dissertation on the effect of the pH value on evaporation of ammonia into the environment. He will then be able to style himself with the top academic title as the first PhD from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark.
Facts: Technology PhD
A doctorate in technical science (known as dr.techn. in Denmark) is the highest Danish academic accolade in the science of engineering. The PhD is awarded on the basis of a thesis that demonstrates the researcher’s significant insight and represents an important advance in scientific knowledge.
24.05.2013
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