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I have. Cow crap is cow crap and if you spread it while "fresh", then be prepared for a few rather ripe days. You haven't lived until you are sitting on your tractor pulling a manure spreader filled with horse and cow manure on a hot day . I HATED that job as a kid!
hay grew like gangbusters, but damn that was a gross job .
LOL! I had a friend who's husband grew up in rural NY. While driving the rural back roads, they occassionally would get stuck behind a slow moving tractor pulling what they called a "honey cart".
The problem with manure is the good possibility of weed seeds making their way into the finished product and they germinate.
If you can find an agronomist close by they can tell what soil is lacking and what is needed. A few soil test can tell what is needed and a fertilizer dealer can mix something specific to what your soil is needing.
Clover is a good crop to use to bring nitrogen into the soil. In pasture land grazing done prudently is best. Meaning down let the livestock eat the grass down to the root.
You can arrange for a full set of soil tests, and the local co-op extension should help. Your nutrients and pH may be fine, but maybe you don't have enough bulk matter in the surface layers, or your drainage is bad because you've gotten hard pan, or you're just growing the wrong variety for your area... any number of things that fertilizer alone won't necessarily fix. A lot depends on whether you have permanent pasture, or you till and reseed/rotate.
If you don't want to spread bulk manure on your fields, or don't want to risk weed seeds (depending on the "weed" it may actually be just fine for your pasture and hay -- most critters like weeds LOL), you can always try making a slurry, steeping it and then spraying manure tea instead. Of course, that works best if your fields aren't already saturated. Bulk manure can be stinky for a few days, manure tea for a little less unless it's really humid and can't dry out or soak in. Think about how much better the feed quality of your new pasture and hay will be and how fat your cattle will be... nothing could possibly stink worse that a huge winter feed bill and low production!
You can arrange for a full set of soil tests, and the local co-op extension should help. Your nutrients and pH may be fine, but maybe you don't have enough bulk matter in the surface layers, or your drainage is bad because you've gotten hard pan, or you're just growing the wrong variety for your area... any number of things that fertilizer alone won't necessarily fix. A lot depends on whether you have permanent pasture, or you till and reseed/rotate.
If you don't want to spread bulk manure on your fields, or don't want to risk weed seeds (depending on the "weed" it may actually be just fine for your pasture and hay -- most critters like weeds LOL), you can always try making a slurry, steeping it and then spraying manure tea instead. Of course, that works best if your fields aren't already saturated. Bulk manure can be stinky for a few days, manure tea for a little less unless it's really humid and can't dry out or soak in. Think about how much better the feed quality of your new pasture and hay will be and how fat your cattle will be... nothing could possibly stink worse that a huge winter feed bill and low production!
Our soil test calls for potash and potassium, and a little nitrogen. We don't need any lime. We do have some clover growing, so that helps with the nitrogen. Three years ago, we no till drilled the field I'm concerned about and put in crabgrass, brome and clover. That year we hayed it.
The following year, our neighbor pastured his cows there. At that point, the field was grazed too low during a drought, so was a little bare in some spots.
The field recovered some this year, but we had a really hot, dry summer here. Mare's tails, curly dock, and ragweed set up residency. We sprayed for the curly dock and brush hogged the seed heads off the other weeds.
I am interested in a natural way to improve the land, instead of the chemical fertilizers that are typical for this area. I guess adding more manure seems to be the consensus. How do you make a slurry?
OK - if your soil test say you're low in P&K, and just a tiny bit low in N, you'll probably do better planting a green manure/cover crop with deep and extensive roots systems like alfalfa, rye, or comfrey rather than using compost or manure or clovers (all are higher in N than P&K). All of those crops have good feed value, draw nutrients up to the surface, help reduce erosion and weed infiltration, as well as improving the pasture's drought resistance. You can either till them in after winter, or just leave them as part of your pasture and hay field.
Another, faster, option to raise your P & K is to apply a combination of bone meal (or bat guano) and greensand... about 25lbs per 1000 sq ft to start (adjust after retesting, these are slow-release nutrients).
To make a slurry for manure/manure tea spraying; just scoop the poop into a 55 gallon drum about a 1/4-1/2 full, add water, and then mix it up with a heavy duty mortar mixing attachment on a power drill. Once everything liquefied, you just need to strain out the solids (grass, seeds, etc) through a medium-fine screen so it won't clog the spray hose and nozzle.
OK - if your soil test say you're low in P&K, and just a tiny bit low in N, you'll probably do better planting a green manure/cover crop with deep and extensive roots systems like alfalfa, rye, or comfrey rather than using compost or manure or clovers (all are higher in N than P&K). All of those crops have good feed value, draw nutrients up to the surface, help reduce erosion and weed infiltration, as well as improving the pasture's drought resistance. You can either till them in after winter, or just leave them as part of your pasture and hay field.
Another, faster, option to raise your P & K is to apply a combination of bone meal (or bat guano) and greensand... about 25lbs per 1000 sq ft to start (adjust after retesting, these are slow-release nutrients).
To make a slurry for manure/manure tea spraying; just scoop the poop into a 55 gallon drum about a 1/4-1/2 full, add water, and then mix it up with a heavy duty mortar mixing attachment on a power drill. Once everything liquefied, you just need to strain out the solids (grass, seeds, etc) through a medium-fine screen so it won't clog the spray hose and nozzle.
Your soils are fine, you need to adjust WHEN you cut your "haylage".
By haylage I assume you mean Baleage which is far different than true haylage. Haylage is chopped up fine with either a forage chopper, or a flail chopper and run through a set of knives that cuts the forage up into 3/4 to 1-1/4 inch lengths. This is the ideal length for ruminant animals. What I think you really do is feed out Baleage, which is hay that is baled in its green state and then wrapped with plastic to ensile it somewhat.
Whatever term you prefer to use, you are most likely cutting your haylage too late. The soil data you give shows that you are indeed right, you do not need lime, and the grasses you grow indicate that they are high in protein. The only thing not mentioned was when you cut them. These types of feed are cool season growers and tend to grow fairly quick, the key to getting high protein is by cutting them early. It is called boot stage, and while most people think of the feed as being "boot high" that is not really true. By boot height, agronomist mean the forage is just starting to emerge from its sheath...its boot. But typically this does occur with many forage types when they are young and so they happen to be about boot high when this occurs. After the forage heads out, you lose significant protein levels...I mean drastically in only a few days time!
Now the bad news is, to get high protein feed you have to cut the grass when it is fairly short, reducing overall tonnage PER HARVEST. BUT if you harvest that forage at 21 day intervals, even in short season Maine where I live, you can get in 5 harvests per growing season. That equates to more tonnage per acre then you can get with the old system of one hay crop, then a second crop of hay. There are two down-falls to this system however. You burn a lot more fuel to get this high protein forage unless you invest in bigger sized equipment that can harvest bigger swaths of the shorter hay. Think hay row mergers here. The other bad thing is reserved for cold weather states...by harvesting the forage well into fall, the forage heights can be hit by winter kill significantly.
On the dairy farm, where we are paid a premium price for high protein milk, we go to amazing lengths to cut the forage at "boot stage". We actually stop planting our corn if it is not all planted yet in the spring, just to get the haylage while it is high in protein. It is that important to us, and we can still have enough time to get a quality corn crop by using 60 day corn, but that is another topic entirely.
So keep doing what you are doing, just harvest it earlier and more often and you will get the protein you are after.
Someone asked about using sea products as a fertilizer and I have some experience in that actually.
Near me there is a plant that makes a seaweed product called carrogean. (spelling). It is used in everything from yogurts and puddings, to Jell-o to tooth paste so the stuff is safe. The plant produces about 100 tons per day of this white paste by product. In their process they use lots of perlite (spelling) to extract the carogean. They promote it as a lime product to help change the PH in your soil. Here on my farm, the PH is very acidic, about 5.2 while ideal forage needs 7.0, so I need lots of lime.
The product is called AlgaeFiber but it has its pros and cons. I like the fact that the prodct has a lot of other soil additives to it besides just NPK. It has a lot of the minor minerals that you just can't get in commercial fertilizers, but in small enough quantities that it is not detrimental to the soil. I like that a lot, and the fact that it is food safe, a natural product and adds to the organic matter of the soil are all serious contributing factors to its use. I also like the 90% perlite it contains. My soil is heavy on the zinc and manganese which contributes to soil compaction. The perlite obviously helps with that. And it does do as it claims, it does increase the PH in the soil...
The biggest problem is, to change the soil PH any appreciable amount, you need tons of it. In fact it takes 12 tons to get the equivalent of 1 ton of lime. Now the product is free and I have a standing contract for 800 tons per year of the AlgaeFiber, but it does take time and money to spread. (Diesel fuel is not cheap) Now lime costs me about $90 per ton after spreading, so you can quickly see that when it is all said and done, it costs about the same.
Now you can readily see from this that you are NOT going to go out and spread 12 tons of this white stuff on a pasture or hay field per application. In fact you can only get about a ton per acre on grass land. That means it will take years to get the soil up where it needs to be. I use some on grassland, but its really not worth it. AleaFiber really can only be used on tilled ground. That is because you can safely dump tons of it into the soil because it is 90% perlite and will lighten it, but also get your PH in tune, then be tilled under.
The other minor issues are the smell. After it has been in a pile for a few months, breaking into it with a loader will take your breath away. It smells like lobster shells rotting in the sun for months...because that is just about what it is. The other minor issue is that the stuff does not readily break down. If you have a clump of it come off the spreader, that stuff will be there a year from now. It does no harm, it just does not break down quickly.
The best application that I have found for this is, using it for freshly cleared land. You can remove the forest, bulldoze the stumps then bring in tons of this stuff to get your PH in tune and lighten the soil. After tilling it under and planting corn, you got a pretty good soil additive for very low cost, but in an appreciable amount that really does your soil some good, and in a hurry. In a nut shell, the stuff works, but it takes A LOT of it.
A few years ago we could get wood ash from some of the biomass boilers around here, and the papermills. As many of you know, wood ash does the same thing as lime and Algaefiber. Now that stuff was great. Like AlgaeFiber it was free for the taking to farmers, and they even paid us to spread it.
The problem was the waste water treatment plants had a raw product called Sludge (A nice word for raw human poop) that they could not get rid of. Waste Water Treatment plants are a great thing and allow 99% of the waste that enters it to be cleaned up, but 1% they cannot send back down the river. This sludge they had to get rid of and so they wanted to give it away to farmers.
We did not want it either....but we loved the wood ash.
So then the powers that be decided that if we wanted the ash but not the sludge, they would mix the two products together so that we had to take both. Here in Maine where our soil is so acidic, we need cheap forms of lime so reluctantly a lot of farms are taking the new mixed product. You just cannot get the wood ash by itself anymore.
The truly tragic part is, with all this mixing, trucking and ground spreading, the cost of fuel is getting so high that some municipalities like Portland and South Portland, no longer get rid of their sludge by farmers. It is cheaper for them to simply dump the raw sludge into their landfills. This is kind of silly. A Waste Water Treatment plant can not get it safe enough to release back into the river, but it can dump it directly into the aquifer...
Last edited by BrokenTap; 01-31-2012 at 01:27 AM..
There are really two ways of getting natural fertilizer into your soil, at least as far as animal manure goes.
Liquid Manure
Solid Manure
With liquid manure, it is scraped, pumped or shoveled into a big holding tank where rain water helps fill the tank. The rain water helps separate the manure sludge by settling it at the bottom of the tank, while the water helps seal the manure. As many of you now, nitrogen is very volatile and exposing it to air means it is lost quickly. Therefore when you use liquid manure on your fields you get a very high concentration of nitrogen...a VERY good thing. It is also cheaper to spread, and easier since you are pumping it and not bucketing it up like solid manure. The problem is, this liquid manure is about 85% water so you are not getting a very good application of organic matter into your soil. (and the nitrogen level makes it very smelly)
Solid manure does a real good job at bringing up your organic matter, smells less, BUT it is more expensive to spread and has a lower nitrogen content.
On our farm, we use as much solid manure as we can on our corn fields to increase organic matter, and use liquid manure on our hayfields because organic matter is not nearly the issue it is with corn, and because the nitrogen factor is higher.
(Unfortunately our modern dairy farm does not produce a lot of solid manure though)
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. I HATED that job as a kid!
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