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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Soil fertility
  • Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 08:46:05 EDT



> 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>




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