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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> There must be local ranches that clean out barns that want to get rid of 
> the 
> manure.

-----------------------

There are a number of horse barns around here.  Until this year, the owners 
or operators were delighted to see anyone show up with a pick up truck to 
take 
away some of the huge mountian of manure they had built up.  One barn, the 
closest here 8 miles away, has two barns.  From the lager, he was in the 
habit of 
loading the stall litter directly into a spreader and putting it on his hay 
fields, but the manure from the smaller barn was dumped onto the mountain.  
Over the past few years I hauled out countless loads of it, some of it seven 
or 
eight years old.  When I had a gig in town several years ago, I often stopped 
by there every day for weeks at a time and brough a load home  .... stuff as 
loose and black as coffee grounds.

Now herself works at a different horse barn two days a week.  When she 
started ther last summer, there was a heap of old horse manure six feet high, 
50 
feet wide, and 200 feet long and they were worried about where to put future 
manure.

With fertilizer having tripled in pice in two years all that has changed!

The two day herself is there, she backs the truck up to the barn and all that 
days manure is put in the truck and comes here.   The other five days a 
farmer next door parks his manure spreader there and takes the manure away.  
He has 
also removed the entire mountain of manure in two months.  Driving by the 
barn closest to us, I see the mountain disappearing and the owner's front end 
loader and spreader parked there all the time.

Look for this to come to a neighborhood near you if it isn't happening 
already.

Remember a couple of years ago how the advice was to get a diesel and just 
stop by the local McWhopper and pick up the used French fry oil?   That 
worked, 
for the first five or six people in a city to do it.  After that, all the oil 
is gone and spoken for.

The same is happening with manure.  It's no longer a waste product sitting 
around in the way.  As fertilizer keeps going up in price, farmers and 
gardeners 
will covet every meadow pie.

Thank the gods I saw this coming down the pike.  Over the past six or seven 
years I've put over 500 pickup loads of manure on the gardens, orchards, and 
hayfields and as long as my two loads a week hold out, I'll make another 100 
this year.  Just yesterday we filled the valleys between the rows of hilled 
potatoes with manure, not close enough to contact the plants directly but 
just 
right to act as a side dressing.

All that organic material has had a permanent effect on the soil.  It was 
inhospitable blue and yellow clay.  Now it can be literally be worked with 
your 
fingers.

Except as an emergency measure, fertilizing fields and gardens is a losing 
proposition.  It is  a temoprary fix even with organic fertilizers and in the 
case of chemicals it can seriously set real soil fertility back 
significantly.  
As in the original meaning of the term "organic", the farmer has to look at 
what is added to the ground as building the soil, feeding the soil, not 
feeding 
the plants.  If the soil is well fed, the plants will do fine.

It is also, says I, a matter of scale.  My plots are small, my farming 
ambitions are small.  Half a dozen pickup loads of manure on a two acre hay 
field 
makes a big difference in the yield.  It would make no difference at all on 
fifteen acres.  I can dress one of my corn plots very heavily with two truck 
loads 
of manure because they are about 50' x 50' each.  If it was five acres of 
continuous corn, I'd be wearing out the ground and that much manure would not 
stem the tide.   </HTML>