Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Claudia & Linda" <dragonhill2@netzero.net>]

My composting is on a rather large scale.  I have sheep, horses, goats, and
pigs.  In the winter, horses and goats are stalled at night.  In fact, the
goats are stalled most nights--they prefer to sleep inside, safely bedded
down.  More work, but better for collecting their manure. Stalls are bedded
with wood shavings or straw.  Each day, we clean stalls and the manure is
taken out to a big compost pile. About every two weeks I use a blade on our
small tractor (Ford 1710) turned backwards, so as not to dig up the soil,
but just scrape out the manure to rake out the corrals and yards around the
barn where the sheep and two cows stay at night.  This is also raked to the
compost pile and at the same time I stir and turn this big pile of compost.
All weed cuttings, brush, clean-out from the chicken house and yard goes to
this pile.  It may grow to be twenty feet long and six feet high over the
winter.   I borrow an even smaller tractor from a friend that has a front
end load attachment  to spread this wealth.  Part of it goes to my garden,
of course, usually just dumped over the fence then added to the raised beds.
But the majority of it has been going back on to the pasture and fields.
Over some of the better pastureland I just spread it by driving and a steady
pace and let it trickle from the bucket to spread a thin layer.  On some
very poor soil that is reclaimed strip-mined land I've been spreading about
4 inch thick patches as I have the compost available then seeding it to
Bermuda and vetch. To incorporate the compost into the soil I'm spreading it
over, I run a disc over it just lightly.  A disc is the only tillage I use
here and the only reason I use it, is that otherwise, the compost just sits
on top of that hard pan left over from strip mining.  I've also never yet
found anyway to plant field corn with disking the ground enough to make a
seed bed, tho' I wonder if corn seedballs would work.  I may try some next
year.

I don't think I'll ever be able to claim to be absolutely no-till.   I'm
sure I'll always at least be chopping away at weeds with a hoe.

Claudia