Fertility Management Question

Stephen, I use the same spreader that you use. I load by hand, and spread it on thick before the final discing.

A few years ago I bought an old JD 1010 crawler to use in the woods for building roads and pushing up logs. It is a bit of a relic, so my expectations are not, nor were not, high. However, the first spring after I bought it I was looking at my manure piles, and it dawned on me that I could use it to turn them for better composting. It works great. I build a contribution pile for a season, then roll it over and let it work again while I build a new one. Before I turn the new one over I move, or spread the old one.

I don’t have a tractor for loading so that is still elbow grease, but generally I like to let the critters rest while I work to load, then I rest while they spread. I was told as a young teamster to remember, “It take a lot of work to work a horse”…. and it is still ingrained in me as part of my relationship with the working animals that I have work to do too, and forking manure is damn honest work.

We still move quite a bit of manure by the wagon-load too, as not all of our food plots are fields. We have raised beds by the house, and now a small hoop-house. Some of that is also done with the horses, but the kids move small loads with the 4-wheeler…. loading and unloading by hand.

I do like the old JD spreader. Reasonably simple to maintain…. although fixing chain that breaks with a load on kind be a little interesting….. Always keep the fork on the forecart.. 😯

Carl

Interesting topic Stephen,. I only use the composted horse manure on our own garden but as part of a logging contract with the horses I a going to produce 125 yes of Ramial chips this spring. The organic farm I am supplying them to has a goal of 250 yards of composted material to add to the soil each year. Popple, birch and alder. Labor/horse time will be of interest perhaps.

With high Phosphorus in our fields, I have opted to use our good horse and steer manure on some neglected distant hay fields. Our horse drawn spreader has been broken for a while now and we are still trying to get parts, so we will be using a tractor to spread the manure. With great distances to cover it will be easier on the horses and less risk of getting into a traffic problem with 4 abreast.

I hope, in the future, to purchase a ground drive cyclone type spreader for broadcasting seed and fertilizer, and a drop spreader for depositing lime and rock dusts on small acreage. Until then my best option for broad application is my Earthway hand spinner or the tractor spinner.

Right now bagged lime and sul-po-mag are the doctors major orders, but I do employ the animals for 2 precision fertilizing tasks. I have a dry box ground driven fertilizer attachment for applying granular amendments. This mounts onto my riding cultivator and I am able to apply at 4 different rates. It works great for heavy feeding crops like cabbage and onions, I use a little Kreher’s poultry manure for this.

The other animal drawn tool that I have is a 50 gallon sprayer. With 15′ of boom width I can cover 5 rows at a time, but I have the ability to shut of specific rows if needed. My idea behind this is to do a lot of folliar feeding of the crops. The theory that people should eat more smaller meals appeals to the way that I manage my crop fertility. With a less than ideal sandy soil I don’t have a lot of capacity to hold nutrients, so rather than a lot of broadcasted amendments that could leach away I will be giving a few small liquid applications during the season. I will be relying a good deal on decaying cover crop matter for a good amount of my fertility, but what I lack in N and micro-nutrients should be manageable with my folliar feeding. I also us the sprayer to apply microbes to my soil and plants, with the hopes that as my soil improves so will my beneficial microbe population. My steers work best for this tool, because in order to apply the desired 40 gallons of water+amendments per acre, they need to walk rather slow and our steers excel at this verses some of our quick horses. I give David Fisher full credit for the sprayer idea 🙂

Because of my P problem, I like to use cover crops and non-P minerals for fertility. While I work on getting the soil in better shape, the side-dresser on the cultivator, and the sprayer come in handy to fill in the gaps of my plants needs.

In the future when we have exported some of our extra P, I look forward to cycling our manure back onto our own land.

I have a friend with a csa that wasn’t happy with organic matter in her soil so she bought some manure solids from a large dairy with a digester. I’m working on her to use horses I keep telling her I have harnesses that will fit her quarter horses. Eli

Like other states with a big poultry past or present, in CT it is getting increasingly hard to find places that can receive manure let alone need it. I need to learn what the environmentally critical level of Phosphorus is for this soil type, but I am suspicious that I am promoting P runoff into the headwaters of a well loved creek if I apply more manure to my garden. 2,000 lbs of P to the acre is rather high, so I just assume not make it worse with manure until I learn more. It is such a shame because manure is such a wonderful farm product when manage correctly. The poison is in the dose.

These are great posts…. I thought of another way we manage nutrients on our farm, and that is through intensive grazing, and feeding hay out in the winter. As Stephen mentioned scale, sometimes scale is determined by economic considerations, but it also can be the other way around.

Importing nutrients as square and round bales, and feeding them out during the winter by moving the steers, cows, and horses around the farm is much less effort and cost than gathering manure, handling it, and re-spreading it, and allows us to maintain the scale that allows us to operate without the kinds of investments that start to dictate scale changes.

Using this kind of system also lends itself quite well to the having draft animals as primary motive power. Using systems that require less infrastructure, or investments in power equipment allow the appropriate use of animal power. I probably only collect about 1/3 of the manure that is generated and applied to the land on our farm. Pasturing hay fields at least part of the year is the primary way we get nutrients on those fields, and end up using most of our compost in gardens.

Carl

we are going to be working 7 acres in vegetables this year with about 4 acres in vegetables and 3 in a 1-yr fallow cover crop. almost all power comes from our team of belgians though we have used the tractor for plowing old sod and occasional heavy plowing jobs during busy times. we do use the bucket loader for all compost loading into our new idea no 18 spreader. the past two years we’ve made all the compost we can with our horse manure, vegetable/food waste from a small community of 35-40residents and leaves/straw/bedding. we generally produce about 25yds of finished compost a year, but we could use more as our vegetable fields are naturally quite nutrient-poor. while this will be our 3rd year running the farm, 3 acres of our land has been farmed organically in vegetables for the past 35years with varying degrees of care and management. that part of the farm is particularly weedy, disease-heavy, and has fertility issues, thus we are prioritizing fallow periods on those fields, typically in a red clover fallow. the past two seasons we have only applied our compost and monthly foliar sprays of fish/seaweed with a 5gal backpack sprayer. the rain really hurt our crops last year, and this year i have started working with lancaster ag as I believe we will see better yields from our fields by adding a sidedressing program to our vegetable crops– especially as we are still working to improve soil fertility. we have had good success with overseeded cover crops in the aisles of our vegetable rows and will continue to do that whenever possible in our production fields. i would be very interested and i’m always looking for a midsize ezee flow or other drop spreader for dry fertilizers/lime. Erika i’m very interested to learn more about the dry box sidedresser that you use on your cultivator, any photos?