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[00:00:00] Mike Howell (2): The dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research use, and issues helping farmers make better business decisions.
[00:00:30] Mike Howell (2): Through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
[00:00:39] Mike Howell (2): Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Dirt. We’ve got another episode I think you’re really going to enjoy today. We went around this topic several times. We’ve mentioned it, but we really haven’t spent a lot of time digging into it. I thought today we would spend a few minutes talking about manure and manure management.
[00:00:55] Mike Howell (2): Now manure is something that is gonna be different depending on where you’re located. There’s [00:01:00] different types of manure, and we’ll get into all of that here in a few minutes. But to help us talk about manure and manure management, we have two guests here. Both of ’em are from Penn State University. We’ve got Dr.
[00:01:09] Mike Howell (2): Rob Myan and Dr. Charlie White. Gentlemen. Welcome to the Dirt.
[00:01:13] Charles White: Hi there. Thanks for having us, Mike. Yeah, great to be here.
[00:01:16] Mike Howell (2): Let’s start off and find out a little bit more about our guest, Rob, if you will. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do there at Penn State.
[00:01:23] Robb Meinen: Thanks, Mike. I am the director of our state Nutrient Management education program.
[00:01:28] Robb Meinen: I have a background in swine industry, but I’ve been at Penn State for almost 25 years working with manure and nutrient management issues, and I have done a lot of work with our commercial. Manure hauler and broker program, as well as our nutrient management program. We also have some odor regulations in Pennsylvania that center around livestock and manure issues, and I get involved with those as well.
[00:01:51] Mike Howell (2): Okay. And Charlie, tell us a little bit more about you.
[00:01:53] Charles White: I am the extension specialist for soil fertility and nutrient management at Penn State, and I deal with a [00:02:00] whole range of nutrient inputs, whether that’s fertilizers or whether that’s manure, whether that’s crop rotations that include cover crops or previous legumes.
[00:02:09] Charles White: Really a very holistic view on nutrient inputs and how to effectively manage those. I do work closely with Rob on the Nutrient Management Education Program. I work. Closely with our agronomy extension team to provide recommendations for farmers. I teach the soil fertility course and rob and I co-teach a nutrient management course for undergraduate and graduate students at Penn State.
[00:02:29] Mike Howell (2): Very good. We wanna get in and start talking about manure a little bit. I know it depends on where you’re located, is the source of this manure. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the different sources. And just to clarify things, we’re kind of gonna talk about manure, but we’ll also include things like chicken litter, poultry litter in that as well.
[00:02:45] Mike Howell (2): We’ll lump it all in together. I’m not sure technically if there’s a difference in that. Maybe we can get into that a little bit as well. I’m based in South Mississippi. I’ve been here most of my life and. I live in the middle of one of the biggest chicken producing places in the country. We have a lot of [00:03:00] poultry litter.
[00:03:00] Mike Howell (2): I’ve had a little experience with some dairy manure as well. What is the main source of manure there in Pennsylvania and what are some of the other sources of manure that we deal with around the country? I.
[00:03:10] Robb Meinen: We have it all in Pennsylvania, right? Anytime we have animals or you’re gonna put something in the front end, you can need something out the back end.
[00:03:16] Robb Meinen: So we can lump all those definitions and species that you mentioned into that definition of manure. So that would include the urine, the feces, but also bedding material that would go into a lot of those products. So we have liquid systems and we have dry systems, right? Solid systems in, in Pennsylvania.
[00:03:32] Robb Meinen: We do a lot with dairy manure and swine manure on the liquid end, but on the solid end, we have a well-developed broiler and layer industry in the chicken world, and we have equine farms as well. So we
[00:03:42] Charles White: kind of deal with all of it. And more and more, some of our dairies are transitioning into beef production, and a lot of the beef cows have solid bedded pack manure as well.
[00:03:52] Charles White: On the poultry side, we’ve got a decent sized duck industry duck. It’s a poultry species, but typically their manure is handled as a liquid [00:04:00] in terms of their production systems. We’ve got a decent veal industry as well, and that’s a very unique type of manure, fairly liquid manure there. As Rob said, we’ve got a little bit of it all and sometimes a lot of it all.
[00:04:11] Mike Howell (2): Why are farmers utilizing this manure? I know that we’ve got some nutrient value to that. Is it just because of the nutrient analysis in that and what nutrients can we obtain from this manure? Talk a little bit about what they’re getting from the manure.
[00:04:23] Charles White: Yeah. Well, when you ask the question, why do farmers use manure, I feel like there’s farmers that sort of fall into maybe two categories.
[00:04:30] Charles White: One would be the livestock producers, where the manure is sort of a waste product from the livestock production enterprise on their farm. In order to get rid of that waste product, the best way to do that is through land application. And in that case, their crop land acts as, uh, a sponge for those nutrients, so to speak, so they wouldn’t be able to produce those animals without a place to be able to put that manure.
[00:04:55] Charles White: On the other hand, we’ve got farmers that don’t have livestock. In that case, manure is not seen [00:05:00] as a waste product, but it’s seen as a really valuable. Resource in terms of the nutrient content, and there are farmers that will pay to import that manure as a replacement for fertilizer. So that gets into interesting questions of how much of the nutrient content in that manure do you credit based on what your crop needs are, which goes back to what your soil levels are.
[00:05:20] Charles White: Is it more economically efficient to bring that manure in than it is to purchase fertilizer? So there’s a lot of agronomic and economic questions that go into those farmers that aren’t producing the manure, but are maybe. Purchasing it in as a alternative to fertilizers. Yeah,
[00:05:35] Robb Meinen: I would say, I would add that manure brings some organic matter to the soil as well, that commercial fertilizers do not, and a lot of people do favor that.
[00:05:43] Robb Meinen: They wanna have that organic matter input to the soil so that their soil health becomes better, and they are increasing that carbon amount in their soil and allowing their soil to be more sustainable and more resilient as far as water and nutrient cycling goes. [00:06:00] So they’re able to have a more resiliency with their crop production.
[00:06:03] Mike Howell (2): Here in my part of the world, some producers will put out chicken litter and they really love it. They see the increased organic matter. They get the nutrient value out of that. On the other hand, we’ve got some growers that will not apply chicken litter for anything in the world. They say that the chicken litter is full of weed seed and we get a lot more weed pressure when we have that.
[00:06:21] Mike Howell (2): And there’s a big debate about that. I know my philosophy on that, but I wanted to ask you guys, what do you think, is there weed seed in this manure or chicken litter, or is that. Increased fertility that’s making some of these weeds more prevalent?
[00:06:33] Charles White: That’s a great question. I hate to say, is it the chicken or the egg?
[00:06:37] Charles White: Right. It could possibly be both. I mean, I would say that the weed seeds are only gonna be in the manure if there’s weeds being fed to the animals. And I would say most of the feed mills are gonna be working with higher quality grains, and they’re gonna be mixing up rations that. Are gonna be low in weed seeds.
[00:06:57] Charles White: So I don’t necessarily see a lot of weed [00:07:00] seeds being transported in poultry manure in our region. But then, you know, look at some other types of manure, maybe horse manure. Are those horses out and they’re grazing in the pastures and are they eating weed seeds? Is it passing through their digestive system?
[00:07:15] Charles White: Yes, it probably is. So maybe horse manure might be spreading weed seeds. Is that horse manure composted? A lot of people say the manure is composted, but that’s a pretty loose term when you hear many people using it. Technically, composting would be. Heated process. An aerobic process where the pile gets hot and it kills the weed seeds, but how hot is the pile getting?
[00:07:36] Charles White: Is it being turned so that all parts of the pile are getting mixed in to kill those weed seeds? So I think it depends a lot on what are the animals being fed? How is the manure being handled after it’s produced in terms of killing off those weeds seeds? And your point about increasing the fertility of the soil, increasing the weed pressure, I think that’s a real.
[00:07:54] Charles White: Issue as well, and something that needs to be dealt with on the agronomic side in terms of managing the cropping [00:08:00] system.
[00:08:01] Mike Howell (2): You know, Charlie, I read a paper several years ago, back when I was still working with Extension, and I couldn’t locate that before we started this recording today, but it was talking about any weed seed that a chicken did happen to eat when it went through the digestive process in that chicken, that it was gonna grind that seed up.
[00:08:16] Mike Howell (2): There would be no way that that seed would be viable. And you think about all the acids that’s going through the rumen of an animal, uh, what is that gonna do to those seed as well? It makes it really difficult for that seed to be viable after it goes through. The digestive process, no matter what animal it’s going to be.
[00:08:31] Robb Meinen: Yeah, I agree. In our region, Mike, we don’t have that concern. I never hear of weed seed associated with poultry litter, poultry manure products. Part of that might be because of our abundant wood chip, right? Our wood product, sawdust bedding material, which really doesn’t carry the wheat seeds into the barn from the bedding end.
[00:08:51] Mike Howell (2): Let’s talk a little bit more about the manure. One thing I learned when I was working with the chicken litter is all manure is not created equal. Rob, you mentioned you had the broiler [00:09:00] industry as well as the laying poultry up there as well. Talk a little bit about the differences in these sources, how the nutrient content may be a little different depending on what the source is.
[00:09:09] Robb Meinen: The nutrient content is gonna vary for a lot of reasons. What some of the bigger ones would be, what goes in the front end of the animal, right? A layer bird is gonna be fed a different ration than a broiler bird. Obviously, the horse and the cow and the pig are all gonna receive a different ration because that ration is formulated to precisely match the nutrient content and the needs of the animal for their growth, their best, healthy production and welfare.
[00:09:32] Robb Meinen: So the animal themselves. What they pick in impacts the system. Then on the other end, we have the bedding. Is there bedding involved? Right. The litter associated with our birds here in the broiler operations is gonna be primarily a wood product base, whereas our layer farms typically don’t have any bedding involved at all.
[00:09:49] Robb Meinen: Those layer birds are in a system where that manure is collected at a raw form and dried off pretty quickly, so the nutrients are not escaping. They’re staying in that [00:10:00] manure and being collected and taken out of the barn. Pretty quickly in a dry form and then move to the field for land application. So the nutrient contents will also vary ’cause one manure has bedding inputted, which will dilute the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium values within the concentration of the raw manure.
[00:10:17] Robb Meinen: And the other one is just the raw manure that’s being distributed straight from the burb.
[00:10:21] Charles White: And the chicken industry is evolving and has different ways that in say, a broiler house, the litter can be managed. Some companies are cleaning out the house after every flock, and what that means is there’s been less manure deposited.
[00:10:36] Charles White: And so typically the phosphorus content of that manure that’s cleaned out after every flock is quite a bit lower. Then the companies that essentially refresh that litter for maybe five or six flocks and they dec cake it, they maybe pile it up to compost and heat for a period of time to kill off any pathogens, but then they spread that back out.
[00:10:56] Charles White: That litter that’s been there for five or six flocks is usually [00:11:00] very enriched in phosphorus. The other thing that can happen with that. Processes. Some of the ammonia can be volatilized every time that manure is sort of raked and moved between flocks. So what we actually see with that type of manure is it’s a little bit lower in the nitrogen and it’s much higher in the phosphorus.
[00:11:17] Charles White: In some regions of our state, farmers have options about what type of litter they can get and they might say, Hey, I really need to build up my phosphorus and I’m comfortable using. Commercial fertilizer for nitrogen. Let me go for that litter that’s had five or six flocks on it, or soils that are really high in phosphorus and they want more nitrogen.
[00:11:35] Charles White: They can go for the litter that’s only had one flock in it. We have things like that going on that are a little nuances as well.
[00:11:41] Mike Howell (2): Charlie, that brings up several things that I have learned or had experience with. You talked about the high phosphorus when we have several flocks going through that chicken house here in Mississippi.
[00:11:51] Mike Howell (2): They used to say that the chicken house has got cleaned out based on the price of the chicken feed. A lot of people don’t realize this, but chicken feed are actually the second most valuable [00:12:00] part of that chicken when the price of the chicken feet go up. They want to clean that out and not subject those chicken feet to that manure as much.
[00:12:07] Mike Howell (2): So that’s when they tend to clean the chicken houses out. Back to the phosphorus. One of the first growers I worked with that was using chicken litter, I asked him, how much chicken litter are you putting out? He said, I’m putting out about six inches. I. He was putting out as much litter as he could get, and he was just piling it up on the fields and then working it in.
[00:12:24] Mike Howell (2): He really didn’t know how much litter he was putting out. It probably had no idea how much nutrients he was putting out. A year or two later we started analyzing some of his soil test reports, and the phosphorus levels were off the chart. So then the question becomes, how do you draw down these phosphorus levels if you’re putting out too much of that?
[00:12:41] Charles White: Yeah. It can be really difficult to draw those levels down because crop removal rates are fairly low. Compared to say, six inches of chicken litter, right? It could take several decades of crop removal. We have one extension educator on our team down in Lancaster County, and his father had chickens on the farm and spread a [00:13:00] lot of manure, and then when he took the farm over from his father, they got rid of the chickens, and I think he spent about 20 years cropping those fields before it got to a level where the soil test recommendations were calling for phosphorus again.
[00:13:13] Charles White: So it’s possible, but it does take a long time.
[00:13:16] Mike Howell (2): Charlie, something else you mentioned, you kind of brushed over it. You talked about composting. Now I know some manure is composted. Some comes straight outta the chicken house and gets spread that way. I’m not as familiar with the swine manure, but talk about composting and why that’s important.
[00:13:30] Charles White: Composting is a process where you intentionally add some additional carbon to the manure if needed. Right? So if it’s a high nitrogen. Manure and it needs more carbon. You might need to add carbon if you have manure from, say, a bedded pack scenario with cattle. There might be enough carbon in it already, but essentially you need to look at the carbon to nitrogen ratio of that material, and you want about 40 parts carbon and one part nitrogen makes an ideal.
[00:13:58] Charles White: Blend and so then you [00:14:00] essentially stack it in a pile and that pile should be big enough that it can heat up you, that that compost come up to temperature, maybe 120, 140 degrees. Would you say That’s about right, Rob? Rob’s really our composting expert.
[00:14:12] Robb Meinen: Yeah, that would be correct. Right? We expect that, that to approach 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
[00:14:16] Charles White: Yeah, so it’s gonna hit that temperature and then it might start to run outta oxygen, and the microbes are gonna quiet down a little bit. It might lose some temperature, and at that point you wanna somehow stir the pile, turn it with a compost turner, get in there with a bucket loader and push it over and rebuild the pile that’s gonna re oxygenate it.
[00:14:33] Charles White: It’s gonna heat up again. Essentially, you wanna do that enough times that you’ve blown off about half the carbon through microbial respiration, and once you lose about half the carbon, it comes back down to a CN ratio of around 20 to one, and then that would be a very ideal compost to be able to spread out onto a field.
[00:14:51] Charles White: At that point, it’s probably ready to be spread. Some of the key changes that occur in that composting process is a lot of the nitrogen that might have been in the [00:15:00] ammonium form will be converted into organic nitrogen, which is a much more stable form of nitrogen. That organic nitrogen doesn’t release odors when it’s spread on the field, so it’s a good way to reduce the smell and odor from manure applications.
[00:15:14] Charles White: It’s less likely to be converted immediately to nitrate. And leach out of the system. So it’s a little bit more of a stable form of nitrogen. Now that said, it is slower releasing because you’ve essentially stabilized it through that composting process. So you’re not gonna get, in the first year, you’re not gonna get as much nitrogen value out of it.
[00:15:32] Charles White: As with the raw manure, but it has some advantages in terms of other properties. And over time, if you use this, you will build up your soil organic matter levels, and the nitrogen will come out more slowly over time. You know, two, three years later, it will continue to be kicking out.
[00:15:48] Mike Howell (2): Rob, anything to
[00:15:49] Robb Meinen: add?
[00:15:49] Robb Meinen: Well, I like to say that organic nitrogen, whenever it’s stabilized like that in the soil, it gives you some resiliency, right? Because it needs to be unlocked, if you will, by the microbial system in the soil itself that the [00:16:00] decomposers in the soil. Are gonna break down that organic material, and part of that is the nitrogen availability to the crop.
[00:16:07] Robb Meinen: So if you have that in the soil, you have some resiliency, right? That microbial process is gonna be tied closely to soil temperature and moisture. So the times when the plants are ready to grow coincides with the time when that nitrogen’s being broken down and provided to the soil system, into the solution, and then into the root so we can capture it for the crop.
[00:16:26] Mike Howell (2): So it’s kinda working like a slow release fertilizer product.
[00:16:30] Robb Meinen: Yes, exactly. Guess we could have said that from the start.
[00:16:33] Mike Howell (2): Okay. We’ve talked about the nutrients in there a little bit. How do we know exactly what’s in a chicken litter sample or a manure sample? Talk a little bit about testing those products and what we need to look for.
[00:16:45] Robb Meinen: I think back to a few minutes ago when you mentioned the person you interacted with was putting six inches of litter onto a field. Right. That gave me an instant alarm because I think most people are not managing that way anymore. We know now that having a manure management [00:17:00] plan or a nutrient management plan really gives us a lot of benefit because we can get the agronomic and economic value from the nutrients in that manure and not treat it as just a waste product for disposal.
[00:17:10] Robb Meinen: And then also. Do long-term health and management of our soils, which in turn gives us long-term economic benefit from our crops. Part of that is testing that manure, right? The more data we have going into the balance rate for the amount of manure we’re gonna put on the field, the better off we are. So testing that manure for.
[00:17:30] Robb Meinen: NP and K, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium content is crucial. Also, recommend that people test their soil, right? How much does the soil need? How much can we put on? And then we wanna know the components of that nitrogen, phosphorus that will go to the crops. We also wanna know the crop yield. What crop are we growing?
[00:17:46] Robb Meinen: What is the yield expectation of that crop? And we can get a balanced rate, and we recommend that for everybody whenever they’re utilizing fertilizers or manure.
[00:17:53] Charles White: And the last thing I’ll add to that, once you have that balanced rate, you need to ensure that your equipment is calibrated [00:18:00] properly to hit that rate.
[00:18:01] Charles White: Farmers have all sorts of different types of manure spreading equipment. Some of it’s very old and the rate is not as certain, but there’s still ways to dial that in, spread a load. Know the massive material that was on that load and divide it by the acreage. That’s a classic way to do it. Some farmers now have very fancy equipment that has rate controllers and it’s all computer controlled, and they can go to any field and just type into the monitor exactly what rate they want, and then they go and the system controls itself.
[00:18:31] Charles White: So we’ve still got farmers that are on both ends of that full spectrum.
[00:18:35] Robb Meinen: I might add though, as well, not every farmer wants to buy the equipment, and if you have a smaller tract of land, sometimes that equipment’s capital’s not worth laying out. So everywhere you go in the country, if there’s animals, you’re gonna have someone who can do this professionally.
[00:18:48] Robb Meinen: So we do have professional manure, haulers, applicators. Brokers who could transport the manure to your farm and apply it at a pretty precise rate. You know, they make a living doing this. So [00:19:00] precision has to come with what they do because they are not gonna make a good living if they don’t do things correctly.
[00:19:06] Mike Howell (2): So we talked a little bit about the benefits of using manure. Obviously we get the nutrient value, we get some increased organic matter. Are there any more benefits? And on the flip side of that, are there any drawbacks to using manure?
[00:19:18] Charles White: Well, I would add that there seems to be the magic of manure that people talk about.
[00:19:22] Charles White: You know, anytime we do an experiment, we compare manure plots versus ones that have just gotten the commercial fertilizer. There seems to be a little bit of a yield boost that we can get with manure. That probably goes back to the organic matter content, but also maybe the micronutrient content. Maybe you’re feeding the microbes as well as feeding the crop.
[00:19:41] Charles White: So that seems to happen. You know, challenges with manure. You’ve gotta have the storage. If you’re importing litter, you’ve gotta have a stacking area. You might have to have slightly different equipment, but as Rob mentioned, you can always hire a custom hauler to come in and do the spreading for you. It creates a whole new set of equipment and [00:20:00] storage infrastructure needed for handling manure that if you’re not set up for that and you just traditionally always use fertilizer, there might be a little bit of investment required there.
[00:20:09] Robb Meinen: I
[00:20:09] Charles White: often view
[00:20:10] Robb Meinen: the topic of minority utilization as a three-legged stool. Two of those are the agronomic use of manure, the economic use of minor, which are crucial, right? You wanna be able to maximize the agronomic and economic use of those nutrients on the farm. But the other one is, whenever you dive into that, you also have an environmental responsibility, right?
[00:20:27] Robb Meinen: The nitrogen and phosphorus, if they move beyond the edge of the field, they do not do any good agronomically or economically, but then they become an environmental liability. If you ask about drawbacks of minor utilization, that is one of them. It’s a societal issue where somebody utilizing the product, you have to do it correctly.
[00:20:45] Robb Meinen: You want to give yourself the benefit, but you also want to make sure that you’re not causing harm beyond the edge of your property. You want to make sure you are building your soil, moving those nutrients and nitrogen and phosphorus to your crop and not be on the edge of field.
[00:20:58] Charles White: And just to add to some of [00:21:00] that environmental concern, you know, one of the things that farmers that are generating manure are faced with is limitations on their storage capacity.
[00:21:07] Charles White: And I’d say most farmers in our state have gotten to the point where they have about six months of storage capacity, but that means they’re applying manure both in the fall and in the spring. And so that manure that spread in the fall, unless that’s for some type of small grain. Forage or grain crop that grows over the winter that has a high potential for losses.
[00:21:27] Charles White: So you need to pair those fall applications with things like cover crops. The other challenge I would say too is that the manure nutrient content, to some extent, it is what it is and it doesn’t necessarily balance with what the crop needs. So oftentimes it might be excess in phosphorus and potassium relative to the nitrogen.
[00:21:45] Charles White: It’s not as flexible as say, fertilizer where you can just ask your retailer to make a custom blend that. Fits what your soil test calls for, and you have to be a little bit more creative in terms of where you put that manure, what fields you put it on. [00:22:00] Maybe do some things to your manure to try and segregate the nutrients.
[00:22:03] Charles White: Like there’s separating the solids out or there’s thinking about, as you unload a storage, like a swine barn that has the under floor storage, they typically don’t agitate that. So the first couple loads and the last couple loads are gonna be really high in nutrients compared to the middle. Loads. And so thinking about where do I take that really rich manure, what fields are gonna need the nutrients the most versus what fields need less?
[00:22:26] Charles White: So there’s an element of creativity that is required when you’re relying extensively on manure as a nutrient source.
[00:22:33] Mike Howell (2): I can’t go anywhere today. You can’t go to a meeting or pick up a farm publication of any kind that I don’t see something talking about regenerative agriculture. I’m not wanting to get off into a discussion about regenerative agriculture today.
[00:22:46] Mike Howell (2): We’ve talked about that on a couple of podcasts. If you’re interested in that, you can go back and listen to some of those. But what I did wanna talk about today, and Charlie, you mentioned this earlier, there’s. Two types of farmers. We have those that have the animals and the crops, and they’re [00:23:00] keeping the manure pretty much on their property.
[00:23:02] Mike Howell (2): There’s also people that have one or the other, and they’re gonna have to transport that manure to a different farm. Talk about the nutrient cycling there and where these nutrients are going and the benefits of that and things to watch out for that way.
[00:23:14] Robb Meinen: Well, one of the things we see in our integrated industries with swine and poultry is that a lot of farms enter into those contracts and build the barn on their property because they have the crop land and they know the value of the nutrients.
[00:23:26] Robb Meinen: Replacing that high fertilizer cost in an annual basis with the manure nutrients, whenever they become caretakers, those animals becomes very valuable to them if they have more animals. Then they have land on a ratio basis, then, then they’re gonna have to export some of those nutrients. So that can become valuable for the surrounding community or whoever’s down the road that can take that manure.
[00:23:47] Robb Meinen: The difference that it’s biggest, I think, is the difference between liquid manure and solid manure, right? The liquid manure is harder to transport a long way, so you have to have that neighborhood. Ability, if you don’t [00:24:00] have the land yourself to take those nutrients to support a couple neighbors with the liquid manure, because of a lot of water in it, a lot of weight in the water, so per pound of nitrogen per pound of phosphorous per pound of potassium, those macronutrients become more costly to transport further down the road.
[00:24:16] Robb Meinen: We see a lot of litter. In our neck of the woods, and I know this is across the country, the dry poultry products can be transported further because you get more bang for your buck whenever you put them in a truck and move them down the road.
[00:24:28] Charles White: And Rob, could I ask you to talk a little bit about some of your research on how you’ve seen different segments of the animal industry move the animals versus move the manure in terms of dealing with some of these nutrient excesses that might occur?
[00:24:41] Robb Meinen: Yeah, so I’m involved with some projects term manure shed. So what is a manure shed? Manure shed is on a small farm level, similar to what we’ve talked about, how many manure nutrients are produced by the animals that a farm, and how much land in the surrounding acres. For the given crop that is typical to the area are required.[00:25:00]
[00:25:00] Robb Meinen: So if you had a hundred cows, how many acres of corn would it take to take those nutrients and be balanced so that we don’t have surplus nutrients that are environmentally uh, liability? So we can look at that regionally as well, right? If we have an area where we have a lot of poultry being produced, or an area where there’s a lot of swine production or dairy production, we can have that imbalance on a regional level.
[00:25:21] Robb Meinen: In Pennsylvania, we happen to have. Several industries that intersect each other, right? The swine and poultry industries both are embedded in the state and producing nutrients in some of the same areas. So we found over time, since it turned to millennium, we’ve seen that the swine industry in our state has shifted the regions in which they’re placing new animals.
[00:25:40] Robb Meinen: So they are moving new barns north and west in our state, which coincide with areas where the nutrients can be used more readily because. There aren’t as many animals there. It also has social impacts because these are less populated areas, so we have less interface between the farm and neighbors. We have less odor conflict.
[00:25:58] Robb Meinen: We also [00:26:00] know that the swine industry wants to move those animals away from other swine farms because of welfare and biosecurity reasons. There’s less risk of transport of disease into a new farm. If you’re further away from other pigs, we see that coinciding and complimenting this idea of moving the nutrients to an area where they’re in need.
[00:26:20] Robb Meinen: We have the social animal welfare and nutrient management aspects going into that, but the poultry industry hasn’t moved as much. They’ve stayed central to where they’ve been located traditionally. But they have other advantage. They can ship that manure shed by moving their nutrients because it’s solid manure.
[00:26:39] Robb Meinen: They can ship it up the road further to a farm that needs the nutrients to land where they can replace fertilizers with manure nutrients. We see one industry with a liquid manure shifting where the animals are. We see the other industry working with a complex developed. Brokering system to move the litter or the manure products to areas where it’s needed.
[00:26:59] Mike Howell (2): Rob, that [00:27:00] brings up another point. I have been hearing more and more talk these days about separating swine manure, their process. They’re setting it up so that they can remove the water from that and actually apply dry product and maybe use the water for an irrigation application or something like that.
[00:27:16] Mike Howell (2): Can you talk a little bit about that and what’s going on in that process? I
[00:27:19] Robb Meinen: think the north separation gives us a piece of the puzzle solving all the complex mass imbalance issues that we have. We have places where nutrients from animals are in a surplus of crop need that creates a mass imbalance of nutrients, a surplus of the nitrogen and phosphorus.
[00:27:36] Robb Meinen: It’s easier to transport the solid portion, right? So if we can separate that into different partitioning of solid and liquid, that solid part is a way to remove or relocate nutrients. That’s big picture stuff, but on the farm level, I see more separation happening in the dairy industry because that manure is more fibrous just because the diet is different than a swine manure.
[00:27:59] Robb Meinen: A lot of [00:28:00] that fibrous material can actually be utilized on the farm. It can be dried and transported. Swine industry is a little harder to capture because that solid portion of the manure is not as fibrous. It’s harder to hold out, and there’s a lot more liquid, more water content in the swine Moore. So I think we’ll see advancements in these more treatment technologies as we move forward, and they will help us to put some of the pieces together of relocating and transporting nutrients down the road to where they’re needed.
[00:28:27] Mike Howell (2): And obviously that if we’re talking about separating some of this manure, that’s gonna have an added cost to somebody. Can we talk a little bit about the economics of that? Is that something that’s gonna be a stumbling block if we wanna start separating manure, or is the cost coming down on that so it’s economical to do that?
[00:28:43] Charles White: I would say that is potentially a concern, but a lot of times the farms are finding value added ways to utilize the separated solids. So for example, on a dairy farm, they might be able to recycle that as bedding material, and then that’s less bedding that they have to purchase. [00:29:00] They might be able to compost that material and then sell it.
[00:29:03] Charles White: And 40 pound bags to VE Lowe’s and Home Depots and Garden Centers of the world, and that’s tremendously high value product if you can do that, I think there are ways that farmers are creatively gaining economic benefits that will offset the cost of that separation technology.
[00:29:20] Mike Howell (2): There’s one other issue that we’ve went around several times here today and with the poultry litter, and I know it’s the same way with the swine manure or the dairy manure.
[00:29:29] Mike Howell (2): For some reason, the neighbors just don’t like it when you start applying manure. They don’t like the odor that comes with that. Now, the farmer really likes that odor because he knows it’s saving him monies a lot of times. Talk a little bit about the odor. Is there anything we can do to help with that situation and not have the neighbors upset if we’re making a manure application?
[00:29:48] Robb Meinen: Well, there’s a lot you can do and none of them are perfect. Odor is gonna occur. That’s part of living in the country. A lot of people want that green space. They want the farms around them. But whenever really comes to manure application, there’s a temporary [00:30:00] disruption in their ability to, uh, have that.
[00:30:02] Robb Meinen: Clean air in some cases, but that’s part of it, right? It’s often a temporary thing, man. Our application is done just once or twice a year on most fields, so that odor source will be there just for a day or two. We expect it to dry up. We expect liquid to infiltrate. And that odor will decrease over time.
[00:30:19] Robb Meinen: But what can a producer do? What can a farmer do? They can think about when they apply applying at times, whenever there’s something going on or people at home. If they can avoid that, they should because then they have less potential for conflict within their neighborhood and everybody wants to be a good neighbor.
[00:30:34] Robb Meinen: We often see that We have what’s called, uh, think about a thermal situation where the sun is hitting the ground and you can see the kind of shimmer of the ground heating up in the morning if we apply manure in the morning. And to get the air that is right at the ground to heat up, it can take odor up, away, and above people’s heads.
[00:30:53] Robb Meinen: I’m not trying to fool anybody, but it’s a trick we can use. So I often recommend that people start applying manure early in the morning, close to their [00:31:00] neighbor and move away, if that’s scenario makes sense. Within a, a large field or within a landscape of a farm that gives the manure time to dry during the day.
[00:31:08] Robb Meinen: And sometimes odors are worse at night. ’cause that thermal inversion is a little bit worse, where the air doesn’t rise and it stays close. And as manure odors are emitted, they can congregate and become a little thicker, more concentrated and drift over to a neighbor and be more offensive. Uh, in the liquid end, we can inject manure.
[00:31:26] Robb Meinen: If you can inject manure, place it below the soil surface well-proven technique to abate odor or reduce the amount of odor that’s produced because the odor just isn’t. Escaping. You know, we have less surface area exposure to the atmosphere, to the free Airstream, and the odors are not getting into the air.
[00:31:41] Robb Meinen: So we don’t have, generation of the odor can be transported to a neighbor.
[00:31:46] Mike Howell (2): Charlie, anything
[00:31:46] Charles White: to add on that? Well, just to reinforce the idea of injection, uh, I’d say that’s one of the most common ways that farmers that are in densely populated areas. Our earliest adopters of manure injection technology.
[00:31:58] Charles White: Their primary [00:32:00] reason was for the odor benefits and keeping the neighbors happy. There’s a lot of agronomic benefits as well in terms of capturing more of that ammonia in the soil as an available source. It also helps. To prevent phosphorus runoff by getting that manure off of the soil surface. So there’s a lot of agronomic and environmental benefits.
[00:32:17] Charles White: When we started talking about this 20 years ago, those types of benefits weren’t at the top of the mind for the farmers. It was really the social benefit of not offending their neighbors with that odor that drove most of the adoption.
[00:32:29] Mike Howell (2): Well guys, we’ve spent a good bit of time here today talking about manure.
[00:32:32] Mike Howell (2): I know we could keep going for, for several more hours. Is there anything really important that we’ve missed today that you wanna bring out, or any closing thoughts you wanna leave our listeners with?
[00:32:41] Charles White: Well, I would put in a plug for a tool that we have developed on our extension website. It’s called the manure economic NPK Value Calculator.
[00:32:50] Charles White: And essentially what it is, is it’s a tool to help a farmer through the math of figuring out whether they’re better off economically purchasing some manure. Maybe that’s some poultry litter brought [00:33:00] in from a broker versus purchasing fertilizer. It’s kind of complicated to figure out the math on the economics because you’ve gotta look at your soil test and how much you need.
[00:33:09] Charles White: You’ve gotta look at the manure analysis. You’ve gotta look at the price per ton of fertilizers that are your alternative sources. It’s not fun to do all of that math, but we’ve created a nice little tool where you can just plug some of the numbers in from your soil test recommendations, price per ton of different fertilizers, your manure analysis, and it kind of tells you what.
[00:33:27] Charles White: Your breakeven prices on the manure in terms of whether that’s a better deal than fertilizer or not.
[00:33:33] Mike Howell (2): Okay, Rob, any closing thoughts?
[00:33:35] Robb Meinen: Well, I’d just like to reemphasize, remember that manure gives us that agronomic and economic value to our systems. And whenever you utilize it, you need to think about the environmental leg of that stool and make sure you’re applying it according to a plan, right?
[00:33:49] Robb Meinen: Every state is gonna have some manure regulations that you’re should be operating under. And if you’re not familiar with those, go to your local conservation professionals, your local university [00:34:00] extension offices, and find out what the rules are. Find out what the best avenues are to utilize tools like Charlie is talking about, to find out how to get that best bang for your buck and benefit your soil and your crop system with the manure that you add.
[00:34:14] Mike Howell (2): Well, gentlemen, we really appreciate you taking time to visit with us this morning. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here and stuff that our listeners can really take home and apply on their farms. Listeners, we really appreciate you tuning in today. If you will, stick around for just a few moments and we’ll be right back with segment two.
[00:34:31] Mike Howell (2): Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At economics, an entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien eKonomics with a k.com at submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
[00:34:53] Mike Howell (2): Listeners, welcome back for segment two today we’re happy to have Dr. Alan Blaylock back with us. Alan, in the [00:35:00] past we have had several questions about nitrogen loss and how to manage that. Today we’re diving into a new topic. Our question today is, we know that potassium is one of our essential plant nutrients, but what does the deficiency symptom look like in the plants, and how important is potassium to crops like hay and wheat?
[00:35:18] Alan Blaylock: Well, Mike, potassium deficiency symptoms, if they’re severe enough to actually manifest as a symptom on the plant, generally appear as a firing yellowing along the edges of the leaves. That’s where they show up first. Some crops they may look a little different. Alfalfa has a very characteristic spotting of the leaves.
[00:35:33] Alan Blaylock: They look speckled, so it’s a little different symptoms. So each crop may be a little different, but generally we see some firing or yellowing of the leaf edges. Now, sometimes if it’s not sufficiently deficient, we may not actually see. Visible symptom, but we see reduced growth or other abnormalities, but generally that’s what we’re looking for.
[00:35:51] Alan Blaylock: Potassium is really important to all crops. It’s an essential nutrient, obviously, and it’s required in pretty large quantities, really similar to [00:36:00] nitrogen in most crops. And there are some crops that take up more potassium even than nitrogen. Cotton’s a good example of that. Potatoes, they take up very large amounts of potassium, so we wanna be particularly aware of the crop needs contrasting the two crops you mentioned, a hay crop and a wheat crop.
[00:36:15] Alan Blaylock: One being a forage where we harvest the entire plant and one being a grain where we only harvest the seeds. Most of the potassium stays in the stems and the leaves. It’s not trans located in large quantities into the grain. So when we harvest a wheat crop, we’re only removing a smaller. Part of the potassium, and most of it stays in the straw and eventually goes back into the soil.
[00:36:36] Alan Blaylock: If we leave the straw in the field, if we bale the straw off, then obviously we’re removing a large amount of potassium in a hay crop where we’re removing all of the plant material. At each harvest. We’re taking a lot of potassium off hay crops, especially alfalfa, take up a lot of potassium, and we remove it all.
[00:36:53] Alan Blaylock: We may remove. Several hundred pounds per acre. A high yield alfalfa crop, five or 600 pounds per acre of [00:37:00] potassium might leave the field over the course of the year in the harvest. It’s really important that we make sure that we are adequately fertilizing with potassium on all these crops, but especially paying attention to it on forage crops.
[00:37:13] Mike Howell (2): Alan once again, we appreciate you taking time to visit with us Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in to this week’s episode, and as always, if you have any questions about anything we’ve talked about today, you can visit our website at Nutrien eKonomics with a k.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with the dirt.
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