As most subscribers are reading this column, it’s about 2.5 weeks until days start to lengthen in the northern hemisphere. Recently, most of the Northeast has been gathering just a few occasional snowflakes. This is very much unlike a year ago, when the Buffalo area got clobbered with a few feet of snow. Those late autumn conditions of 12 months ago are more normal than what we’ve been experiencing surrounding this Thanksgiving.
Farsighted winter-savvy dairy farmers, who daily spread manure – and most dairy farmers are still in that class – often designate a level area near cattle housing for strategically removing this overdose of nature’s white bounty. They plow out this flat area, trying to keep it free from snow build-up. This ground, now bare, freezes quite nicely, assuring the availability of “any port in a storm” – one where equipment will not get mired. Scraping bare this comparatively small area of sod in order to create a hard-frozen spot on which to pile manure really works quite well.
I do something similar to a part of our front yard. This is because our driveway is rather narrow; also because our garage’s single parking spot is usually hogged by my pick-up truck (the bed of which is commonly encumbered by bagged product that needs to stay dry). To create a parking spot in the front yard for our car, I use our snowblower (after clearing the driveway). Minus the insulation provided by many inches if not feet of snow, the manure piling spot – and the parking spot – soon freeze hard enough to make sure that no vehicle gets stuck. The typical Northeast winter is one big reason that manure may not travel too far from the barn, particularly with non-grazing cattle management.
But a lot of times, it’s just so convenient to do your spreading as near as possible to home base. As a result, fields which are more remotely located tend to get short-changed on manure. This means that purchased crop inputs must be introduced to help the remotely located fields avoid nutrient starvation. This also means that the nearer fields are more likely to be a pollution threat through surface water runoff or ground water leaching down to the water table, brook, river and ultimately bay and ocean.
As we continue pursuing the science of manure allocation, it’s increasingly easy to notice the disparity between “near the barn” and “far from the barn.” This contrast became glaringly evident when I was advising a Mohawk Valley dairy crop person who had just moved from Illinois the year before. I took several soil samples for the newcomer. When the results came back, we observed that the phosphate, potash and magnesium readings were all very high on the field right behind the barn. This Midwest transplant told me that the previous owner had plastered the field right behind the barn with huge doses of manure.
His other soil tests showed that fields farther away were much less blessed with nutrition and were starving for phosphorus. Over decades of crop consultation I have observed that when one field is over-fertilized and this causes another field to be cheated nutritionally, the yield improvement of the first field is consistently less than the yield suppression of the second, short-changed field. Thus, spreading a uniform quantity of manure per acre over all the cropland that needs it can be expected to improve average yields compared to the all-too-common feast or famine methods.
The take home message here is that before winter really sets in, growers should be sure to spread the most distant fields first. If field conditions permit spreading manure farther away in late autumn and early winter, it will be great not to have to worry about spreading on those more distant parcels during spring’s normally more uncertain conditions.
Similarly, it’s good to spread lime this autumn, since we don’t know what those unknown spring conditions will have in store for us. The other reason to apply lime in autumn is that winter’s freeze/thaw action breaks down the lime particles further, thus increasing their effective neutralizing value.
At an early age, I was easily convinced of the merit of spreading the farthest fields first. This wisdom closely paralleled something my father shared with me and my brother Jim when we started to paint an old farmhouse. We had just moved into the dwelling in western Greene County, NY, in 1962. Jim and I had ladders in place to start painting the front of our house when Dad told us to move the ladders to the back of the house and paint there first, then the sides and lastly the front. When asked why, my father explained that he grew up in Minnesota during the Great Depression where he saw many houses with only their fronts painted because the owners ran out of paint and couldn’t afford any more paint. He wasn’t taking any chance on that happening with his house.
Let me close with one last profound thought on hardcore cropsmanship – namely, when the landowner takes soil samples and then gives them to me to get analyzed and something curious often occurs. Specifically, all I knew about the samples was the cropping intensions and the soil type. I didn’t know how far they were from the barn. All too often the fields more distant from the livestock center showed lower soil nutrition and lower yields … which I guess really isn’t rocket science.
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