Pasteurized cow manure (PCM) was used as the nutrient media. The use of PCM has been validated as an effective nutrient media in the earlier study , however, the presence of solids in PCM led to eventual clogging of the BTF, as reported in . In this study, an improved method of pretreating the manure was adopted that consisted of the following steps: (i) coarse sieving the cow manure to remove large solids and fibers, (ii) filtering through 500 µm sieve, (iii) centrifugation at 8000 rpm for 10 min, (iv) filtering the supernatant through 125 µm sieve, (v) and lastly heating the filtrate from 125 µm sieve till 70 °C for 1 hr. Two different batches of PCM were prepared and their analysis is given in Table . PCM Batch 1 was used from the start of reactor operation till day 280 and PCM Batch 2 was used afterward till day 450.