[dominiquer60]

We started tapping this past week, we have over 800 already, but haven’t finished since it cooled off and we on to taxes now. We brought almost 2,000 gallons to our neighbor to boil and he has made 50 gallons so far. We have yet to put pails out, just 2 vacuum lines mostly tapped. Lots of squirrel damage here and some leaky saddles. We hope to get back at it when the current polar vortex migrates north once again.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I don’t see any spam, but a little grilled spam sounds good on a night like tonight 🙂

[dominiquer60]

Wonderful work Donn and Maryrose! It is a great taste of what can be done with draft power, I hope it inspires more people to take interest. I enjoy watching your animals, they are really comfortable with their work.

[dominiquer60]

We collect the manure from 6 Percherons and 2 working steers. The manure is collected from 2 to 4 box stalls daily and every few weeks from the horse shed. The barnyard is scraped a few times a year and added to the manure pile as well. Horses are mostly out in the shed, but 2-4 spend nights in the barn in winter/bad weather. The steers are in a small lot with shed during the winter months, I collect all of the manure from the feeder and shed into 2 piles daily and haul a couple cart loads to the main manure pile when the weather allows. I don’t mind this work in the winter when I can use the activity.

I the summer most of these animals spend a lot of time on pasture or in the horse shed during the heat of the day. We move manure to the big pile with wheelbarrow or Ox cart from the Ox shed. Once in the big pile all handling is done by tractor with loader. We turn the pile a couple of times when we can, but we don’t make actual compost with it.

One thing that we have learned it that our ground is saturated with phosphorus so we are going to be exporting our manure to distant hay fields via tractor and large spreader. I would recommend knowing what the nutrient levels of your fields are so that you know where the manure is needed most, it can do more harm than good in certain circumstances.

One thing that I would love to do differently is to have a covered manure area were we can keep it dry and prevent leaching of the nutrients and hopefully have a better turning process. Maybe with better storage and turning we could sell some of it to local gardeners since we can’t use much of it.

Utilizing raw manure is ok, but organic standards are to spread it raw or improperly composted at least 120 days before harvesting from it. New FDA standards for manure spreading could be even longer, with the exception of vegetables like potatoes which grow in the ground and are low risk because they are always cooked before eating. Personally I wouldn’t want to spread raw manure until just before I am to til it under or before a good rain, this minimizes the N loss.

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[dominiquer60]

I have yet to use a forecart for anything in the market garden other than as a commuting vehicle. We use a Whitehorse with hand lever steering for plowing with a 2 gang trailer plow, seeding with a brillion seeder, culti-packing, or if we borrow a friends ground driven manure spreader. For haying Sam has an older very modified ground drive cart, it was originally an I & J. I can’t tell you much about the custom cart, I have only seen it used once.

Personally I would like to purchase a Barden style cart for a multitude of reasons that I gave on another post. If we buy a newer whitehorse or pioneer cart in the future it must have the torsion axles, our knees are not getting any younger. A Farm Boy 4 wheel power cart would be nice for baling if we ever win the lottery, which we won’t since we don’t play 🙂

[dominiquer60]

Tim, I contacted our one Soil Scientist at UConn to find out what a general environmentally critical P point is for our soil type. He gave me the # of 200 ppm for P, anything over that and we should avoid manure, the field across from the barn will not need manure for the next 100 years 🙁

[dominiquer60]

There certainly seems to be a lot of success when the bales are made right, like in New Zealand and Europe. But a lot of risks if the bales are not made right. I have a feeling ours are best fed to the beef.

Here is a good article I found: http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/livestock/horses/facts/info_botulism.htm

[dominiquer60]

Like other states with a big poultry past or present, in CT it is getting increasingly hard to find places that can receive manure let alone need it. I need to learn what the environmentally critical level of Phosphorus is for this soil type, but I am suspicious that I am promoting P runoff into the headwaters of a well loved creek if I apply more manure to my garden. 2,000 lbs of P to the acre is rather high, so I just assume not make it worse with manure until I learn more. It is such a shame because manure is such a wonderful farm product when manage correctly. The poison is in the dose.

[dominiquer60]

I fed oats from a cover crop that became a problem for my no till garlic. I fed it green fresh cut to my steers, they really liked it until it got a little too old and started to deteriorate in quality. I got a good 10 days of green/nearly green feed off that little plot. Like Carl says it can have some good feed value when, like any hay, it is cut on time.

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[dominiquer60]

Carl can you explain why you would never feed a moister wrapped bale to horses.

I recall a Thoroughbred farm in NY that only feeds wrapped bales during the winter, but now I can’t remember if they were low or medium moisture. What is the difference to you?

Thanks,

[dominiquer60]

Jake Byler
395 Steam Hill Rd
Ellenburg Center, N.Y. 12934-2314

Thanks to Dennis Decker!

[dominiquer60]

With high Phosphorus in our fields, I have opted to use our good horse and steer manure on some neglected distant hay fields. Our horse drawn spreader has been broken for a while now and we are still trying to get parts, so we will be using a tractor to spread the manure. With great distances to cover it will be easier on the horses and less risk of getting into a traffic problem with 4 abreast.

I hope, in the future, to purchase a ground drive cyclone type spreader for broadcasting seed and fertilizer, and a drop spreader for depositing lime and rock dusts on small acreage. Until then my best option for broad application is my Earthway hand spinner or the tractor spinner.

Right now bagged lime and sul-po-mag are the doctors major orders, but I do employ the animals for 2 precision fertilizing tasks. I have a dry box ground driven fertilizer attachment for applying granular amendments. This mounts onto my riding cultivator and I am able to apply at 4 different rates. It works great for heavy feeding crops like cabbage and onions, I use a little Kreher’s poultry manure for this.

The other animal drawn tool that I have is a 50 gallon sprayer. With 15′ of boom width I can cover 5 rows at a time, but I have the ability to shut of specific rows if needed. My idea behind this is to do a lot of folliar feeding of the crops. The theory that people should eat more smaller meals appeals to the way that I manage my crop fertility. With a less than ideal sandy soil I don’t have a lot of capacity to hold nutrients, so rather than a lot of broadcasted amendments that could leach away I will be giving a few small liquid applications during the season. I will be relying a good deal on decaying cover crop matter for a good amount of my fertility, but what I lack in N and micro-nutrients should be manageable with my folliar feeding. I also us the sprayer to apply microbes to my soil and plants, with the hopes that as my soil improves so will my beneficial microbe population. My steers work best for this tool, because in order to apply the desired 40 gallons of water+amendments per acre, they need to walk rather slow and our steers excel at this verses some of our quick horses. I give David Fisher full credit for the sprayer idea 🙂

Because of my P problem, I like to use cover crops and non-P minerals for fertility. While I work on getting the soil in better shape, the side-dresser on the cultivator, and the sprayer come in handy to fill in the gaps of my plants needs.

In the future when we have exported some of our extra P, I look forward to cycling our manure back onto our own land.

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[dominiquer60]

I put a query on the NYS Draft Horse Club facebook page. If I get any info I will share it here.

[dominiquer60]

Here are some Kress documents for anyone interested in prices. They are high, but when I think about how much these tools can reduce hand weeding at $10/hour labor cost, they could pay for themselves relatively fast.

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[dominiquer60]

Gabe, Thanks for all of your hard work!

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