According to the Albany Times-Union, a tiny hamlet in Lewis County just north of Tug Hill State Forest had the distinction on Nov. 30 of having one of the highest snow readings in New York – officially 45 inches of the white stuff.
This pre-winter “bonus” arrived as lake effect snow pushed across Lake Ontario, dumping precipitation in the western part of the North Country. Residents of Barnes Corners could boast about receiving that 45 inches of snow during that recent temper tantrum of nature. Unofficial accumulation readings elsewhere may have exceeded that figure.
Lake effect snow forms when sub-freezing air passes over a lake’s warmer unfrozen waters. Lake water then evaporates, warming the air. This moistened air is blown away from the lake. After traveling over colder ground, the air dumps its moisture on the ground, usually as snow.
As most subscribers read this column, it’s about a week and a half until days start to lengthen in the northern hemisphere. Until recently, most of the Northeast had been gathering just a few occasional snowflakes – very much unlike two years ago, when the Buffalo area got clobbered with a few feet of snow. Those late autumn conditions of 24 months ago are actually more normal than the snowless conditions we experienced prior to this Thanksgiving.
Farsighted winter-wise dairy farmers, who daily spread manure, often designate a level area near cattle housing for strategically removing this overdose of nature’s white bounty. They plow out this flat area, keeping it free from snow build-up. This ground, now bare, freezes quite nicely, assuring the availability of “any port in a storm” (where equipment will not get mired). Scraping bare this comparatively small area of sod, so as to create a hard-frozen spot to pile manure, really works well.
I do something similar to part of our front yard. Our driveway is rather narrow and our garage’s single parking spot is usually hogged by my pick-up truck – the bed of which commonly contains 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 lots of times, it’s just convenient to spread as near as possible to home base. Thus, more remote fields tend to get short-changed on manure. This means that purchased crop inputs must be introduced to help 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, creek, river and ultimately bay and ocean.
As we continue pursuing the science of manure allocation, we readily notice the disparity between “near the barn” and “far from the barn.” This contrast became glaringly evident years back, when I was advising a Mohawk Valley dairy crop person who had recently moved from Illinois. 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 Midwestern 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 starving for phosphorus. Over decades of crop consultation, I have observed that when one field is over-fertilized – and this causes another to be under-fertilized – the first field’s yield improvement is consistently less than the yield suppression of the second, short-changed field. Spreading a uniform quantity of manure per acre over all the cropland that needs it should improve average yields, compared to the all-too-common feast or famine methods.
The take home message is that before winter really sets in, growers should be sure to spread the most distant fields first (kind of a moot point for folks around Barnes Corners). Field conditions permitting, spread manure farther away in late autumn and early winter. This helps growers avoid worrying about spreading on those more distant parcels during spring’s normally more uncertain conditions, when mud often prevails.
Similarly, it’s good to spread lime this autumn, since we don’t know what spring conditions lie ahead. 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.
Years ago, I was convinced of the merit of spreading the farthest fields first. This wisdom closely paralleled something my father shared with me and brother Jim when we started to paint an old farmhouse in 1962. Jim and I were about to start painting the house front when Dad told us to move the ladders to the back of the house and paint there first. He explained that he grew up in Minnesota during the Great Depression. There he saw many houses with only their fronts painted because the owners 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 cropsmanship – namely, when a landowner takes soil samples and then gives them to me to get analyzed and something curious 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. And that wasn’t rocket science.
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