Are you paying attention to what your storage is telling
you? Although we have traditionally done most of our manure application in the
fall, spring application is becoming more common. There is a variety of reasons
for this, ranging from striving from better nutrient management, to labor
availability, available application days in the fall, and just general storage
management.
This past fall, field conditions were difficult for getting
manure application finished in some parts of the state, it got rainy and stayed
wet – not exactly great manure application conditions. Add to that that harvest
was a bit delayed this year (which means we had lots of manure to get applied
and fewer days than normal to get it all done), and we have a recipe for some
fuller storages this spring. (That’s not even mentioning that soils cooled to
50-degrees later than normal and once they did they quickly dropped to freezing
temperatures). Put all this together and it seems like we should be asking
looking at if we have enough manure storage to make it to the fall or if we
should be looking at applying some of our manure this spring while our fields
are open.
It goes without saying, but one of the most important
aspects of being a good environmental steward is managing your manure storage
so that it doesn’t overflow. I talk and write often about the right place,
right time, right method approach to nutrient management, and these concepts
are important, but all the good they do can be quickly washed away if we aren’t
managing our storage to prevent overflows from occurring. So what should you be
looking at in your storage right now?
You should be assessing how much storage you have left
available compared to the amount of manure you anticipate generating until your
next application window. Right now we
are looking at somewhere around 6.5 to 7 months (26-28 weeks) until we reach
our fall application window. As a rough rule of thumb I’m expecting about 1 to
1.25 inches of manure accumulation in a deep-pit swine finishing barn every
week, this means that you are looking at about three feet of manure between now
and early October. If you plan on making it until your soils have cooled in the
fall, and you will probably be looking at closer to 3.5 feet of manure. Do you
have that sort of storage space left? If not, think about using spring as a
chance to do a little insurance hauling this spring to make sure we are putting
our manure resources to good use now and can pick the best times in the fall
too.
Unfortunately, I don’t have numbers like that for different
animal species at the tips of my fingers (for lots of reasons, one being that
if you build an outside storage you need to account for rainfall, but also can
have different shapes to your storage), but hopefully you do. Installing a
staff gauge in your manure storage (or having a way that you can accurately
estimate how full the storage is) is a great way to compare year-to-year and
make sure things are where you’d expect. It can also be useful for detecting a
water leak, deterring if outside runoff water is entering your storage or
something else funny is happening if you are not filling up at the rate you
expected.
