MSU Extension Animal Agriculture

- Okay. I, I live up in the Northwest part of Ohio I live in the Lake Erie watershed peason So we have a lot of encouragement to do a better job with our manure application so I'm going to talk about some of the technologies we're working on what we think is working well for us very adaptable to other states and vices like that, we really emphasize the forearms of trying to use the manure as a right nutrient to right place the right time and the right amount this is the same thing we've been emphasizing with commercial for advisors dealers for many years you know we can do a pretty good job of spreading manure. this is just a Google aerial photo I pulled up the other day when I was scanning through some Google and so everybody's watching us what we do as a manure and how we're gonna about it this is a pretty good job it's a one dead here. The biggest thing I would emphasize is that when we survey livestock haulers and livestock producers and things, we got about 50% of our manure in our part of Ohio is for applied manure and if I look at the July to September time period and I've got here also I'll turn my screen into a pointer here. If we figure the amount of we were on after salvage harvest we're probably you know closing in on 65% of our manure applied in the fall and by doing that, you we're following what the crop allows us to do because our most of our fields are planted, but also we're losing a lot of the nitrogen that we probably could capture if we could get it on growing crops. You know, our dairy mineral is primarily stored on outside ponds for common hog manure primarily stored under slats of hog buildings and those account for different conditions and different nutrient values in the manure. When we work with the drag hosts technology we're going to talk about here in a minute, but just to emphasize that people look at what their nitrogen values are in their manure they're going to use it as I'm going to show and that is that almost all of our nitrogen that's in our our home in our sample we have here this is a finishing sample is ammonium nitrogen you see this ammonium nitrogen level coming across here 35.97 of the 37.68. total pounds of nitrogen are in the ammonium form readily available to be used at once to find something that'll grab it and grow with it little bit of organic nitrogen and this was a dairy sample of course, organic would be higher and then when we have our P2O5 and our K2O, when we work with side dressing or merged corn or top dressing wheat especially with the corn, if I can get a two to one ratio of P2O5 to ammonium nitrogen then I can get a pretty good side as side dress mineral product. The reason I like that is that if you look at a two-year corn soybean rotation, and we're going to use the manure to provide a side rest fertilizer for the corn, a two year crop of that it's going to take out of the ground about a 100 125 pounds of P2O5 and that corn crop is going to need roughly 200 pounds of nitrogen so I get a two to one here that I can put on the adequate amount of nitrogen and get the P2O5 I want I like that two to one ratio of, of nitrogen to phosphorous and then I just like to emphasize to everyone that when we talk to people about transporting mineral greater distances having somebody buy manure, 40% of N P and K value in that liquid manure is usually in the nitrogen portion. So when we're putting that out in the fall we're not really trying to grab that and run with it. We started many small plot research projects 15 years ago and we've put together a pretty good data set that we felt really comfortable and we've gone and, and we've gone in the direction of using it as a side dress. This is just the typical video this is a one of our university mineral tankers we took off the, the wide flotation tires we put pay loader tires, we had some special rims built and then we have a lot of farmers who have both organic and commercial who've adopted manure as their primary nitrogen side dress and I'm not saying every acre that they own but whenever they want to grow or they want to utilize that manure, they can do that. You can see they're building way up in the top left corner here in this picture but this is just a farmer that's going through these seven corn side dressing and he got about 225 bushel per acre with this he's pretty pleased with it and that's why it's such an attraction for both organic farmers and commercial farmers if we're asking them to move manure further like we currently are in Lake Erie watershed If they can replace all the purchase fertilizer especially the nitrogen, if they can replace that purchase nitrogen with the nitrogen in their livestock manure is a perfect match. If you do anything with tankers and again we have fields that are small enough that tankers are the first choice. We have fields that are rocky enough, that drag hoses would fit or enough role to them that drag hoses are a bad choice. If you couldn't use a tanker, we really recommend you look at using something that's going to take the action now and this is just a deeper sweep design now, all I did on mine is I took off rather than having eight inch sweeps I made them more in a five inch sweeps just to make it a little bit easier for me to go down through corn rows, not cloud stuff out those types of things. This is a picture of one of the drag hose units that we were running earlier this spring. This is Harold's farms in Darke County. Believe it or not, there is corn actually in the field It's at the B3 stage it's just hard to see but I just wanted to show, and he's leaving us he always leaves us some commercial fertilizer treatment areas so that we can have a side-by-side comparison but we've got data from him since 2014, and on this instance we're using a cause those ski toolbar we dropped out the middle unit so that the hose rides higher in the ground than it would be if you were telling that center so we run an up one and a half rates of manuarable sides and because we have a guest row in his design we also run one and a half to the outside relevant toolbar and he simply putting on about 6,500 gallons of swine finishing manure and in this instance, Harold's always plant their fields at 45 degree angles to make the drag hose work out best. So rather than planning the field straight as they normally would to make it easiest, to spray the harvest and things like that, they pick one field for each of their finisher buildings each spring and make sure they print out the 45 since a hose, a hose Harper is not needed in the field. If we look at their data over a period of years, they run about 17.3 bushel per acre batter on the manure strips than they do the commercial fertilizer strips that matches up really well with our university small small plot data where we do about 18 bushel batter with the manure versus the commercial fertilizer and then when they do their math when you add the bushels gain at the price and the fact that they're putting on their P and K at the same time they're not buying commercial fertilizer they feel really well that this is assistance is fitting in for many many years. The other thing that we look at from strictly an environmental point of view is the balance for them over that time period if you figured 200 bushel corn and 65 bushel beans, faker new movel rates for P2O5 and K2O we take out 70 pounds of P2O5 with that corn crop 51 pounds of P2O5 with that soybean crop for a two year removal of 121 pounds. When they put on the side dress manure application when the corn's at about the B3 stage, it's a growing crop they put about 6,500 gallons on which is about 221 units of nitrogen and they're putting on 117 pounds of P2O5 and a column to the right is the K2O. Over the course of a two year period of time they're just out break even and their fields are all in a maintenance range for phosphorus and they feel really good that they can go on and definitely using Hoffman or in this manner and they don't get all of them in our out on their corn each year but they can get a pretty substantial amount they always save enough room that they can reach a week season if for some reason we cannot get on corn. So it's but eight for the seven years we've worked with him it's always been successful And even their K2O is not that far out of whack for a two year period of time. The university equipment we have three 12 row toolbar, and this is not one of them cause this is a VTI unit but this is what a Harold started with when they first began and all of our three units have a principally a rolling coder in the front boot putting manure right on top that till ground, and then closing wheel to try to use a little coverage in a no-till situation that we run with with Harold's that we didn't get very much coverage but apparently we get enough of that manure absorbed in that we've done very very well on our yields over those years. So far, it's not as same as a D3 sweep, but again it's another way to apply manure and it's a low pulling pressure commercial applicators have gone this route quite a bit in the state and the nation so it's pretty common to see. The other thing I want to talk about is the layout of the hose. This is the way we did it about the first three or four or five years that we did have plots and this is basically we planted a field this is a 40 acre square field but you can see us planted at a 45 degree angle, you can see the angles here where the in rows meet the long rows you look at it and we just gonna switch in so it doesn't confuse you. When you look at it from the other end you can see where we've gone back and forth and you can do that because the hose gets a little shorter the pole gets a little less each time and the commercial mineral applicant can make that happen they can hold their row we can continue what they're doing with fields being planted with auto steer and commercial applicators having auto steer it's a pretty simple process. and there's many farmers who would never do this but if you really look at these fields when they're all done, you can see where they've turned each time on the end down here and you can see where they've turned each time on the end down here and these ends will have to have some commercial fertilizer put on them, but by far and large everything else is strictly with the side dress. This is a very wet year you can see where the field tile are showing up in the field we've had some great years and we've had some regrettable years just agriculture and that was the first way we put my out the hose, the second way is we lay the hose down the length of the field on one side, these rows are planted this way in the field quarter mile this way roughly quarter mile the other way and we put the hose humper on the ends of field this again when we had it at a 45 we did need a hose humper now we do. So when we look at this this works out real well for us as well the hose Humper basically maintains a stance on the end and then this guy's going back and forth and he's side dressing his corn and then when he gets that far in the hose humper's gonna kick in you can see the building over here kinda of half a mile away and this has worked really well for us as well some people prefer it that way. The third way that we've done is we've looked at putting a hose humper in the center of the field and we lay a bunch of hose out on the end and this is on top of the farmer's soybeans and then this here, my pointer's going across this is the corn planted so so this is a north of westfield. the hose humper is pointing straight east in this situation and as we go and this is kind of a video you can see the hose that comes from the building we're running into how to cross a bean field. We're going to lay out plenty of hose this is a different field but it's the same general idea of how to do it we put a lot of mainline hose out here that we're going to be pouring and then they drag hose is gonna go out and this is a hose humper tractor on the far left side and the applicator tractors are running right now in this field. This is a half a mile field, and we can put that hose humper in the center and it works really well we can even see the hose is being pulled off to the east side in this picture a hose hoppers guy is talking to his brother-in-law or his son-in-law and they're discussing and then they can sit tight until this guy gets back across and comes through and if you follow in behind him, essentially this is what everybody can see in this instance we're putting on about 5,000 gallons per acre swine finishing manure the hose humper guy is sitting quiet out of the road this guy's gonna go by and he's gonna pull this drag out of this the full length of the half mile and takes you to a one-way to tractor to make this happening but in this instance, you know you've got corn at the B3 stage you're putting your manure on growing crop and you're going to be balancing for P2O5 over two year period of time. The big drawback with this is that most commercial applicators aren't really set up to do this, to follow corn rows, just a fact of live so in our in our grant process, we provided a tractor to allow a commercial applicators to operate it and then of course they provide the pump applicator. So he's released the brake on the hose reel down here they're lining themselves back up the applicator of course is using auto steer so it's for easy to get going again and then he's going to head right down through there and make that work out for him. When they get to the other end I can make the turn and they can and that'll that wing will fold back out here in a minute and they can continue on. We do not have a toolbar like this yet in our arsenal this is from Western Ohio the Allen Brothers kind of develop technology and Camden as run with it but we think this has really got a bright future this is a silver version of the original cadmen system that they came out with this is much cheaper it doesn't have quite the gizmos that the first one had again, he's gonna get going and he's gonna tell the operator of the tractor get your gear, get that hose withdrawn there we go and then they're gonna take off down through the field and do the return trip. We also have lot of farmers that have done a surface application if I had to be honest, we have more of this right now with the commercial applicators in Western Ohio than we do incorporation, but we have thousands of acres of manure on top of emerged corn. Perhaps this isn't as good as incorporating but we did start a research project this year where we incorporated that manure with a field cultivator within 24 hours of application and the yield was within two bushels per acre of actually incorporating the manure as we apply so there is some real potential that we can surface apply like this and then we can go along and incorporate that manure before that nitrogen is lost. We've also tanked with trying to sidetrack or to flatten soybeans with with a, drag hose. I guess this video's not going to play for me but we flattened beans at V3, V5 and V7 going both ways with a dry coarse Basically so V5 and V7 of V5 and V3 and V5 no problem but at V7 you see where this soybeans been snapped off and then it's going to grow up or this beans been snapped off it's gonna grow up or I'm just telling you that V7, the dry CO's is pretty tough on soybeans So you probably want to avoid that. Social media wise we try to put a lot of our data out on our university facebook page, Ohio state extension and environmental admin or management you're welcome to look into that kinda watch what we do we try to put at least lot of videos, a lot of research data out there just because it's faster than to write that up in a, in a journal article that nobody's going to look at Our goal is to open more days of time that you can apply manure. If you can get on where we're putting in our, on corn that gives us another 30 to 40 days easily that we can get manure applied. So what's something that we really wanna do we wanna capture that nitrogen, and we understand that most of our traffic tenders are not set up for this yet, but some of our guys are starting to look at it pretty seriously one of our biggest applicators, the switch and he took an uncovered his own ripper and remodeled that into his manure applicator. So that's the technology that we're looking at in Ohio be happy to take questions or I'll be around the end of the program if there are questions there. - All right thank you Glenn, one question here from Laura what do you think are the next steps to broaden acceptance and use this different technology technique and timing for manure application? What are potential barriers to acceptance? - [Glenn] I think the the best thing to do is to get the equipment in front of them many years ago sow and waters wanted to encourage no tail so they, many of them rented no tail equipment out to farmers for a couple bucks an acre and farmers were able to use that equipment so when they did their replacement for their planter you know, like many of them do every five, six years and they went that direction with that type of equipment so we want to make sure we get this type of equipment out in the hands of farmers through the use of grants and things and then hopefully they'll do the math and I think in many instances if we can get two or three families together whether they be brothers or cousins of whatever and look at this technology they can afford it and they can kind of like we use to fill silos when I was a child, somebody owns the choppers somebody owns the wagons, somebody owns the blower so that's how I think we need to look at that.