Manure

Manure. What a subject to be writing about!
I write what I am thinking about at the time and manure is what I am thinking about right now so this is what gets posted.
I am specifically thinking about the fertility program for this farm for the coming spring and summer and long term too of course. If I had to choose one book out of the whole world it would be the Bible. I think that the Bible has the information and instructions needed for everything in life, including and especially agriculture. Tending the soil and plants was the job given to my ancestor Adam and God made sure to give the needed instruction so that job could be done well. From what I learn in reading the Bible, Monsanto, Cargill, Eli Lilly and Simplot’s are conspicuously absent. No mention at all is made of using their fertility program, their chemicals and fertilizers and seeds. I think that is an important piece of information! To think that we don’t have to use their (rather expensive and poisonous) products and recommendations is exciting to me!
I notice a couple of things regarding a fertility program in the Bible that I’ll mention, I am not going to get into all of it because this is not a study of that.
Luke 13:8 says “And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:” Which tells me that tillage and manure were used for bringing production up. Jesus was the one to tell the story so it’s got to be ok right? Another thing is the land Sabbath which is never used anymore but I think we should take a closer look at the principle.
Anyway, for fertilizer, all I can find in the Bible is manure. I know it works, I have always used manure for gardening and fruit trees and even in the crop fields when I had enough to spread. Unfortunately, that was an uncommon occurrence. When I was a little boy (I guess that would be until I was about 10 years old. I was pretty small back then if I remember correctly.) we had a horse boarding stables and my Mom trained horses so we always had a few around. Every day the barn would have to be cleaned out and the manure pile out back was always used on the flower beds and on the vegetable garden. I remember we would pile into Dad’s little tiny pickup and go down the road to the place where they had the horse shows and we would load the pickup with more horse manure and spread that around the flower beds and the garden. We always had a fantastic garden and the yards looked like a park, good enough for weddings in the summer when the flowers were blooming. (Mom and Dad were married there.) Horse manure was the only ingredient on top of terrible rocky soil that was closer to a gravel pit than a garden. In fact, there was a corner that we used as a gravel pit.
So as you can see using manure for growing things is almost in my blood, the problem has always been how to get enough of it to do the job. Now that I live here that problem has been solved.
My neighbor happens to have a buffalo feedlot, that has about a thousand head, sometimes more and sometimes less from what I hear. He doesn’t feed them any chemicals and the feed is clean too so I don’t have to worry about chemical contamination for organic. The best part is he has a lot of manure and I can have it!
I took a look at the place today to see how much material I was going to have to work with and as close as I can guess from just looking there is more than enough to cover my entire farm with at least a foot thick layer. He has a track hoe and a great big pay loader that he is more than happy to load with, all I have to do is haul it 1.5 miles to my fields and dump it on. Thankfully I have the use of a dump trailer that will haul about 40,000 pounds though I doubt I will be able to get that much manure in there because of lack of room. As close as I can figure using similar things that I have hauled I should be able to fit ten tons of manure per load. Kyle wants to cover about 4 acres in manure and I want to do about the same as well as pile up about 100 tons for top dressing once it has been composted thoroughly. Since it has been piling up for so long over there I am sure it has composted somewhat already but it would have been anaerobic and we want aerobic bacteria for good compost so I’ll run it through the composting process which won’t take long, I’ll explain that process in a little bit.
I figured that I would like to apply at least 20 tons per acre this year since this is the first year any of my land has ever been worked. Right now it is in a grass sod that will be fun to get rid of this spring! I figure if I can make the fertile topsoil deeper I should do it, it’s like an investment. Why have a 6 inch layer to pull from when you can have 3 feet? I won’t be planting very much of the crop ground this summer because I’ll just be fighting the grass. I plan on working with the 2 acre patch this summer and then tackling the other areas next summer after I fence them off. For a start, I’ll cover the entire 2 acre patch with a 2-3 inch layer of the partially composted manure, which should run about 20,000 pounds per acre. It’s hard to estimate that because the weight of the manure is really variable and I haven’t weighed it. I don’t really care though, as long as I get a good layer on it won’t matter too much. With that on I’ll run over it with a moldboard plow to bury everything probably 6 inches deep. I’ll determine that for sure when I get the plow in the ground and see what it is doing and how deep the soil is in that spot. It’s such a small spot that it will be tough to use the Cat on it because I would be constantly turning. I’ll probably use the Kubota and a 2 bottom plow for that job. Since that particular piece of ground has excellent drainage I am hoping to be able to get into it early this spring. I’ll have to spread manure when the ground is still frozen or else I’ll leave a hardpan like you wouldn’t believe driving the truck in there. I learned that lesson the hard way one year when I drove the back hoe across one of my wheat fields when it was slightly wet out. I chisel plowed that field afterward really thoroughly and planted wheat and the wheat did well except in two tire tracks where I had driven across. It even showed up in the stubble in the fall! I now know that compaction is a real problem.
So, spread just before it thaws, plow when it is dry enough, cultivate that a week or two later to add oxygen and then I can work on getting that piece in shape throughout the summer. What I figured I would do is plant 1,000 strawberries and a small vegetable garden and of course my gladiolus row (I try to grow a thousand or more every year) the rest of that area I’ll keep tilled up every two weeks or so with rotating equipment until it’s loose down about 8 inches and the manure has composted. Then I’ll plant buckwheat in there as a cover crop because it does such a nice job of mellowing the soil and it competes with grass weeds really well. A side bonus is the huge amount of organic matter I’ll be able to till in after about 30 days. I may plant and till in a second cover of buckwheat but that depends on how it looks this summer. I’ll have to wait and see! In the fall I’ll spread probably 10 tons of manure per acre, tilling that in with the tiller before drilling winter rye for winter cover. That should go in about the beginning of September. That will grow up fast and hold a good portion of the nitrogen and other goodies from the manure that would have leached in the winter, in the spring I can pile on another layer of manure eight on top of the rye, let that grow until it’s dry enough to work, when it will probably be about a foot tall or maybe even more.

I have a somewhat lazy approach to farming. I say, feed the soil micro life and don’t worry about being too particular about what the universities say or the soil test guys say because the micro life knows it’s job and can do it much better than all of those educated fools can. In an acre of soil there are about 3 tons of bacteria working for me and the plants. That of course is a really variable number. I don’t know who counted them all but I am assuming he used average soil. Some soil could be many, many times more than that and some soils are sterile after the educated fool farmer gets his sprayer over it enough times. My approach is to encourage and work with the soil life and the best way to do that that I know of is to feed it! Soil life likes to eat dead plant life of any form, especially when it has come through the digestive tract of an animal. Actually, a good carbon source is what I want. One surprising soil life food is just plain old white sugar! I’ll only use that for a specific purpose though like in a foliar spray when I am trying to encourage the bacteria population on the leaves of the plant. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much of a chance to experiment with that yet, though where I have it has really shown an improvement. For long term improvement plain old organic matter is tops in my opinion. When the soil around here was first taken out of prairie sod it was about 6% organic matter. My soil here has never been out of sod so I am thinking it should be around the same 6% mark though I haven’t tested it yet. Organic matter holds the nutrients in the soil of course which is why I am wanting to get it up to the high numbers! Most of the average fields here now are barely topping the 1% mark, tillage and cropping eat up organic matter in a blink of an eye. My goal is to steady out at 6% and go up from there every year. In order to bring the organic matter (humus really) up and keep it up I’ll need to add plant material like mad as often as I can. That 20 tons of manure I’ll spread will disappear fast. On average, half of the fresh organic matter is converted to humus by the soil life in the first two months after being applied to the top 6 inches of soil. I had an experimental 2 acre plot at the other farm that I did an intensive soil building program on for 4 years and then I disked down a 6 foot tall crop of sorghum/sudan grass in August. In three weeks you couldn’t tell that I had disked anything at all, the entire 6 foot tall crop had been eaten up by soil life and turned into nice humus. The next year I got a 100 bushel oat crop, but that is just what went into the combine, I lost a tremendous amount of the crop because we got a pounding rain that flattened everything and it pounded the oats right out of the heads just before I was ready to combine it.
One of my favorite soil builders is rye. It has this ability to scrounge deep and wide for nitrogen and then hold onto it until I till it under where it can release that to the crop next summer. It also almost eradicates grass weeds if it is managed right, as well as it adds a huge amount of organic matter to the soil, both from roots and the above ground parts. Another brave guy with a ruler measured the roots on a rye plant- 387 miles of roots and 6,000 miles of root hairs! That’s a lot of root area for collecting nutrients and keeping them at home where they belong, adding organic matter when they rot and breaking and loosening the soil and hardpans.
I said I would mention compost and I will, but only the way I have done it and how I would like to do it. There are tons of methods for composting but this is what has worked for me for a long time. It’s simple and it works.

In the spring I just pile manure and old hay or straw in windrows about 6-7 feet tall and the same wide and however long I have enough material for. As soon as I can start hauling manure from the feedlot I’ll just pile it up as deep as the piles behind the dump trailer happen to be. Then I watch it for signs of activity, which usually show up In about 3 days, jets of moisture coming out all over the place and lots of heat. That is about time to race for the loader because it is getting too hot by then. A better way would be to use a thermometer and I may get one this spring. You are supposed to turn it at around 150 degrees or so. Anyway, I just take the back hoe and turn the pile over with the loader one scoop at a time, it doesn’t take as long as it sounds. A few rules I go by are, if it stinks it is long past time to turn it. If it is hot it is probably getting to be time to turn it. If it won’t heat it probably needs water unless the proportions of nitrogenous matter and carbon are not close enough (should be 30-1 carbon to nitrogen, I just have to guess what is about right). Usually I have to turn about every three days for the first few weeks depending on the weather, after that it slows down and in about two months the compost is done. It stays relatively cool and looks like soft dirt and smells wonderful.
Now that method leaves a lot of problems untended. It’s not precise, it’s somewhat wasteful, it always leaves lumps of un digested materials and there is considerable nitrogen loss. I have a lot of ideas for doing a much better job of it. One is to make a compost machine, which is relatively simple if I can find the materials to make it with. There are two ways to do it, one is a drum type and the other is just a simple turner type that you run over the windrows outside. I probably won’t get to that project for a few years though so I won’t worry too much about it now. Another project I have wanted to try for a long time is building a methane digester. That composts anaerobic but in controlled conditions so the finished compost is actually much higher in nitrogen and other nutrients than aerobically done compost, it just doesn’t have the kind of micro life I want in the soil. The way to fix that problem I guess would be to take the anaerobic compost and add it to a well established aerobic pile and keep the oxygen up on it so it turns aerobic. I’ll have to check that out a little more thoroughly.
The benefit of processing the manure that way is I get a lot of methane as a byproduct. It’s relatively simple to filter it and polish it to remove the acids and the carbon dioxide and get it down to more pure natural gas. Yes, that’s the same natural gas people pay a fortune in hard earned green paper for. Calculations say that one cow produces enough natural gas to cook meals for a family of four every day. Not having electricity makes homemade natural gas cooking look rather nice to me!
One limiting factor in greenhouses is the fact that they almost always have far too much oxygen in the air. That’s nice for me working in it because I get oxygen rich air to breathe. Unfortunately, plants need carbon dioxide and put out oxygen (I guess that should be fortunately, we would be low on oxygen if God hadn’t made it that way) Big commercial greenhouses sometimes add carbon dioxide to the air but those systems often cost a lot to install and run. Composting on the other hand, releases a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide. Some experimenters have used that carbon dioxide in their greenhouses with huge success, one guy I read about would buy sick looking plants from other greenhouses and just put them in his compost enriched air greenhouse and they would green up in a matter of a day or two with zero fertilizer. I would like to try that in my greenhouse when I get it finished.
On the technical side of things, comparing manure or compost to commercial fertilizer is tough. Even within chemical fertilizers values are tough to figure out. (I hate even calling them “fertilizers” they have nothing to do with soil fertility in the long run.) Everyone has seen the NPK values, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Each chemical “fertilizer” has a NPK value, but the values are crazy in my opinion. For instance, the N in anhydrous ammonia has half the value of the N in ammonium nitrate, and the N in manure is valued differently from either of the two commercial products! What I gather from this is that I cannot trust anything the “educated fools” say. The problem is that it really depends on the testing method, one method of testing reads differently than another with the exact same sample. But, for a somewhat useful comparison I’ll include this rough example of NPK rates of certain manures, just take the readings as unreliable as they are and you’ll be fine. I guess the best use is in comparison between each manure, I would think that using the same testing method for each manure would give a reasonably accurate comparison between them.
Chicken-1-1-.5 Cow- .7-.3-.6 Sheep- .7-.3-1
About 70-90 percent of the nutrients fed to an animal are recoverable in the manure, depending on the stage of growth the animal is in and the conditions.
It’s cheap, it’s easy and it works. And it is endorsed by the Bible! It’s an easy decision for me, I am going to use it!
I’ve said enough, anyone that has read this far has either got to be nuts or is as crazy of a farmer as me.