Animal Manure WARNING !!!!!!!

Lot of us try to farm organically, at least in part. One of the ways of doing that is the use of animal manures.

I have a nightmare experience to pass on about manure I got from a local horse stable. I got several dump truck loads delivered several years ago, part of it was well aged and I put it straight on the garden. The fresher stuff when to the compost pile, and aged for another 2 years, being flipped 3-4 times a year.

The first year using the manure, we noticed our garden simply refused to grow well....never had this happen in previous decades of gardening. Last year, even worse. Plant would come up stunted, leaves curled....I thought we had the mother of all blights.

But I started reading and began to suspect the manure I'd put on the garden. This spring, I did a test with two containers of peas (in gutters). The one on the left was started in commercial potting soil. The one on the right in 3 year old compost made primarily of that horse manure/sawdust. Note the difference.

What I discovered made me sick. I'd poisoned my garden. The stables had GrazonNext HL mixed in the fertilizer they used on their pastures. It goes right thru the horses, and concentrates in the manure.....which is the design.....to stop the grown of weeds out of manure piles.

I printed off the 1st page of the product label for Grazon, showed it to the stable manager, and "No....never seen it".....because he didn't buy Grazon directly.....it came mixed with the fertilizer supplied in bulk and spread by the local farm co-op.

THE PRODUCT LABEL SAYS: "Hay is not to be removed from the farm/ranch where this product is used"......as in NOT SOLD OFF THE FARM. It then goes on to state "animal manures may affect vegetable growth".

Well, no MAY about it. Stuff is toxic to a wide variety of vegetable right on down to a few parts per BILLION. And no, it doesn't 'break down' in a year or so if concentrated in manure.

Thanks a butt load Dow Chemical.

 

Another case of the cure causing a greater problem than the cure was intended to correct.

 

"Better living thru chemistry"....until it isn't.

 

And that is the reason some fish species are dying off and the reason all male species have reduced testosterone, that meaning birth control pills harm the total environment.

Makes so called global warming look nice.

 

There ARE days when I'm glad to be the age I am and know my future time here is limited. I'd hate to think I had another 60 years or so of having to put up with the stupid crap in this world.

 

Damn it !

 

No longer compost store bought things in my compost. Grown all over the world, all different kinds of rules on what is allowed for chemicals, only God knows what kinds of disease or bugs there are on them, and so it goes on. Have had peat moss that was so acid that if not treated would kill almost everything that you tried to grow in it, neighbor uses lawn chemicals to kill bugs, broad leaf plants, etc. No birds on his lawn, no bugs, no bee's, killed most of the flowers around his house, and the water from his place runs down under the road and on my land. Spoke to him, and he just bragged about how much better his lawn looked than mine. He is the same one that took his family the first night of the ice storm a few years ago and went to the shelter. They had no power, so no heat, no water, no lights, etc, couldn't live without it. Gone 14 days and had to have plumbers fix pipes, etc. All OK, his insurance paid for it.

Here in normal times I don't invite people into my greenhouse, try to grow all my own seedlings and clone as much as I can, no longer use unknown manure on my garden, and even then the one you get your manure from doesn't always know what is in it as above found out. Much of the compost you buy at the big box stores lists forest products as a major part of it. That usually means tree bark and limbs, may include trimmings from tree service, which may be cut under power lines or along side of roads, may have been sprayed in past, may include material from hurricane clean ups with salt or fuel spill residues, or limbs and branches from processing trees killed by insect infestations in the forests, or who knows what else. Just because they say it is OK doesn't always mean it is.

 

Yup, had this same thing happen to me a few years ago.

It's tough because the Horse people don't know what's in their hay, and often times the hay people don't know (or won't admit) either. AND it takes forever to leach back out of the soil once it's contaminated.

 

Scary!

 

Or the people spray for ticks, bugs, and flies, or vet gives wormer or some drugs for treatment of the cattle or horses, or the sawdust bedding has come from trees that were in area that has one of the new wonder Chinese insects and was from trees that were sprayed or the sawdust was. Used to be one of benefits of sawdust or shavings for bedding was that it absorbed the urine and thus was high in nitrogen, now it just soaks up and holds any thing applied and transports them to your compost pile. Better living and dying thru chemistry. Bad part is some of now known dangers are in the parts per trillion range, thus 10 gallons of something can contaminate at 1 part per trillion, enough water to end California's drought.
Americans Waste 1 Trillion gallons of water Each year | Mathematics of Sustainability

If you are going to buy that ideal bugout location, if they raised potatoes, truck garden, had an orchard, etc on the old farm 50 years ago it may have problems with lead and other heavy metals, all kinds of old insecticides and herbicides, and God knows what was discarded on that land over time, later they used the "modern" selective weed killers that are just as bad. Had an uncle who cut and burned the brush in front of his fishing cabin after the county sprayed it to keep the roads neat. Was in hospital for weeks, had problems for years and was on dialysis for the last 5 years of his life. Never was able to prove anything, but he was in good health when he burned the brush.

Thank you TnAndy for bringing up a very important point, it really isn't a good idea to die from some chemical side effect at your bugout while waiting for TSTHTF or to find out that all will grow on that beautiful 40 acre field is Roundup resistant seeds from some hybrid seed company. The best part of the post is the picture of the two rows of plants, it illustrates that if the ball drops, it could be the difference between life and death.

Again pointing out the necessity to actually use some of your expected skills and resources before your life depends on them being effective.

 

This is scary ,, we've all known for years all of these chemicals aren't going to be as beneficial to us as they've been making them out to be .
How long will it take to get your property back to sustainable levels ?? What can you do to fix it ??

 

Residual antibiotics in the environment is something people never think about, When I was working did a study on the bacterial resistants of E.coli in wild dolphins. E.coli in dolphins had a resistance to a wide range of antibiotics, surprising how much gets into the environment from a wide range of sources. Live stock production uses a lot and much of it is not metabolized and passes out of the animals. Could be affecting the soil microorganisms if your using manure ---something to think about

 

A high amount of horse urine in the manure will do the same. Burns the plants. Dad used to use manure from my sister's horses. Had to be careful to not get it from where the critters wizzed!

 

We were poor so Dad bought an old place that the locals had turned into a dump.
After removing umpteen pick up loads of trash to the LEGAL County dump it was near paradise with old growth post oaks. When the oaks were cut with a 2 man cross cut saw, well 1man 3 kids, we used the largest trees to build a barn. Leaving the 2 feet or less to mature with still a well covered place.
Never could grow a good garden even if the place was one of the best looking in the area.
Both parents were from farms in Mo. and lived from gardens' production, and knew how to grow even in the more southerly region.

 

Don't know and don't know. Plan right now is to remove soil out of the raised beds in the hoop house and replace with soil off the farm. Plan for the garden space that I loaded up with compost last year is to raise something like sunflowers in it, cut the stalks and burn them where I burn my sawmill slabs (big hole). And use the other garden space now in a thick field of clover as our outside growing space for the next couple of years.

 

Wow, here is the general run down on this stuff, never heard of it till I read this thread, https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/ppls/062719-00628-20110804.pdf

 

I sure hate to hear of this. If someone's survival depended on that field for survival,, it could mean their actual death , by not producing what it once did.
I knew a guy that did welding in a big plant nursery. They would get loads of dirt delivered in , then the plant would start their soil prep ritual. My buddy said they got a contaminated load of dirt one day , and they shut down the plant ,, had the dirt loaded back up and hauled it out ,,, they had people sweeping up dirt from the driveway, the trucks tires , etc . Pressure washed the bays the dirt was dumped in. He said you'd have thought they were having a nuclear meltdown.
Good luck to you Andy ,, I wish you the best of luck in getting it straightened out as soon as possible.

 

2,4-D is one of the ingredients in Agent Orange, an herbicide that was widely used during the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. However, 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), a contaminant in the production of another ingredient in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, was the cause of the adverse health effects associated with Agent Orange.

 

Some things never change.

 

Had to deal with this 13 years ago when we relocated the farm to Southern IL. brought in 20 tandems of horse manure and spread it over 12 acres. With a fair slope and regular rainfall the plants start doing better at year 5, much better at year 8 and normal at year 10/11. The problem with it leeching and running off is it is just getting sent down the ditch, to the stream, to the creek, to the river to the ocean. I sent several samples of the Manure I brought in to a lab and still have the sheets floating around somewhere, if I run across them and remember I will scan them and post them. But what I saw convinced me to NEVER again use manure that didn't come from my cattle, goats, hogs or horses! Expensive test as I had it literally tested for everything but best 1500 bucks I ever spent. What I remember off the top of my head were several antibiotics, Bute, several herbicides active ingredients, 9 different synthetic petrochemical salts. The big regret was not having the manure tested before I spread 200,000 pounds of it and disced it in.

I have read that one way to speed the process of removing this stuff is to plant annual grass, mow it off in the fall and rake it off and remove it to someplace down hill from the gardens. A lot of this crap just never goes away. It just gets moved around.

Once I got the cattle numbers up, I got more than enough manure from around the hay rings to scrape into giant compost piles. Took some time to get rolling and making the volume of composted manure I needed each year, but I know what goes down their throats and what comes out their back sides. Off the farm manure is a roll of the dice