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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Animal Tillers
  • Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 04:44:20 EST


Alan Brant <castoriver AT juno.com>
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 11:56:37 -0600
X-Message-Number: 16

The practices you recommended, of following chickens with vegetables
is
exactly what Bart was bewailing as unsafe & apparently against organic
certification rules. neither the pig manure nor the chicken manure would
have been composted. I'm confused.
*************

I think a step got missed on the pasture-to-seedbed animal tiller plan. Let me try again to explain it:

1. Start with sod.

2. Pigs - confine with 150-foot electric net and portable shelter, scatter grain on ground so they'll root for it. If you only have a couple of pigs, reduce the area to which they're confined by double-walling the electric net fence.

3. When the plot has been denuded and chopped up, move pigs and sow quick-sprouting buckwheat and millet. As soon as it's up a couple of inches, add...

4. Chickens in portable 4-foot-wide "tractor" pens, with straw and leaves and finished compost for bedding.

5. When the "flooring" in the pen looks like the kind of garden seedbed you want (or when chickens are ready for harvest, whichever comes first), remove the tractor pen.

6. Sow a "nurse crop" for green mulch or fertility -- peas, vetch, whatever will suit your crop planned for the bed. For instance, I'll let vetch get started before I put in tomato or pepper plants.

7. Plant crops.

I think that I might not have been clear about Step 6 in my original post -- I do admit that more than once I've skipped it.

Even without the "nurse crop" step, any manure from the chickens and pigs will have been worked on by ground microbes for at least 60 and more likely 90-120 days before crops are harvested. It's a good point that the high temperature action of composting is skipped in this plan -- I had planned to put lettuce in right after the chickens but can see that this might not be a great idea because of the possibility of manure contamination even if the seedbed seems physically perfect for a fast-growing leaf crop right away.

A slower crop held off the ground (like trellised or staked tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) or one in which the outer rind is typically discarded or at least not used (like winter squash) might be a better choice for the first plantings in animal-tilled beds. With heavy mulch to keep weeds down, and an autumn layer of 3-4" of well-aged finished compost, the bed would be ready for leaf crops the following spring with no further tilling required and about as pathogen-free as dirt ever could be.

Plants have not seemed to mind that the manure is not aged more than a month or two before they make its acquaintance. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that it's been scratched into the soil along with plenty of carbonaceous and green material.

The finished animal-tilled bed is not a static plot with manure lying on top of it. It's more like a compost pile that's been constantly agitated (sort of a super-aerobic system).

With all of the interest and concern about manure contamination, I do intend to make sure that I don't skip Step 6 this year. After all, I want to stay well and I do want repeat customers!

At the market, which was another topic and another whole problem of manure management. <G>



Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY


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