The Manure Management Advisory Committee met yesterday. The purpose behind this group is to exchange information on current research and extension activities related to manure management.
Some of the research that was proposed last year has been taken over by the Achieving Manure Phosphorus Balance In Manitoba Technical Workshop. The Manitoba Livestock Manure Management Initiative has a lot of research information and the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment continues to promote cross-discipline communication.
The research that particularly interested me was the recently started project on the Fertilizer Equivalence of different manures. At this point we know that even if you apply manure very precisely for a target N rate, the N actually available to the plant is different from that target number. We need a formula to determine how much is actually available with a fair measure of precision, particularly for high-value crops. If you think you’re applying 100 pounds of nitrogen and you’re actually applying 60 pounds, you’ve lost a lot of yield. Hopefully we’ll have good formulas for different manure types in the next few years.
Fact sheets for field testing of nitrogen in manure and for how to sample manure for laboratory analysis are still being developed. There is work being done on a more consistent comparison of manure processing systems and methods.
John Heard is organizing a soil and manure clinic for July 23, 2010, but details are still being worked out.
Those were the points that stood out for me. I felt somewhat out-of-place among all these research people, but that where extension work comes in – passing on the research information to the people who can actually use it.
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