John Heard posed the question “Which Supply of Phosphorus is more Critical to Producing High Yields: Fertile Soil or Applied Fertilizer?” The answer is that you are better off with high soil test P than with putting on high levels of P2O5 fertilizer. I find this encouraging as we deal with high soil test P [...]
Conservation Ontario has a manure management site up, ManureNet. What they’ve done is round up links to different aspects of manure management across Canada. If you want to see what the state of manure management research is in various provinces, this is a great place to start.
The NCLE Newsletter pointed to Joe Ackerman and Nazim Cicek’s literature review Evaluation of the opportunity for manure treatment/processing technologies to achieve manure phosphorus balance (PDF). It’s definitely worth reading. The key problem is that manure supplies nitrogen and phosphate in roughly equal proportions and crops use roughly four times as much nitrogen as they [...]
It was a little disappointing to read that it’s Back to drawing board for variable-rate manure spreading. I’m not surprised, given that precision agriculture with highly consistent synthetic products is still in its infancy. There is talk of various systems for real-time measurement of nutrients in manure, so hopefully as those develop variable rate manure [...]
I attended the Soils and Manure Management Field Workshop on Friday and learned quite a bit. A lot of the research that was shown is still in the early stages, so there will be a lot of good stuff to follow in years to come. Here are some of the highlights: Don Flaten and Clay [...]
MAFRI and an alphabet soup of other organizations have arranged a Soil and Manure Management Field Workshop on July 23, 2010. They’re planning on covering a number of manure management issues in a field setting. I attended a similar workshop a few years back and learned a lot from it, so I’m looking forward to [...]
A Nutrient Excretion Model is a way of measuring the nutrients that come onto a farm and accounting for where they leave the farm. We’ve been working on Nutrient Excretion Models for a few years and have had great success with them. The model highlights places where farmers are paying to have too much phosphorous [...]
Extension.org has an article up on Preferential Flow of Manure in Tile Drainage. We’ve done some work with tile drainage and plenty of work with manure application, but no projects so far that overlap the two. A lot of of the advice seems like common sense, e.g don’t apply manure when the drains are flowing. [...]
AgProfessional.com has another story reminding us of The Roots of Nutrient Uptake. It’s not enough to have the nutrient out there on the field, they need to be available for the plants. One of the challenges with manure application for plant nutrition is that the nutrients are broadcast across the field. Even if you have [...]
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 [...]
