Most farms around here (in farm country) have contracts with other folks to come clean out and haul away manure. A person used to be able to get free turkey or chicken manure/bedding if you were willing to shovel it into your truck. Now, that stuff all gets cleaned out by companies with skidsteers and dump trucks. The farmer doesn’t have to do the work…and they get paid for the manure.
Now, if you can find someone who has a horse or two (not a horse farm, a hobby place) you might get lucky.
I would say if you have access to fish guts…that can be a good source of nutrients. I use to bury a lot of walleye, crappie and sunfish guts in my veggie garden
Good thought, I have 2 neighbors who do a lot of fishing.
The trick is to keep on looking when you don’t need it. Once my source dried up, so now when i drive by and spot stables i stop and ask. There is one place i use and two others i know of.
Ask enough places and you’ll find a few.
I have a few local horse stables. The one i get mine from are show horses like for Rodeos etc. The owner hates the manure piles but understands that its part of the process. She tries and tries to give it away but nobody but me and a couple others take it. I have to shovel and wheelbarrow it onto a trailer.
The other stables are for local horse boarding and one sells their manure on social media. People go nuts over it. They have started bagging it and its becoming very popular. People love the bags and love to pay money for it.
I think each of my loads bagged would sell for $800 or so.
Words of caution- I go get free manure from the horse farm, I get free wood chips at a local dump pile, i also get free compost from a local city.
I have found Jumping Worms in every one except for the leaf compost…so far. My neighbor got a chip drop dump a few years ago from clearing power lines and after a few years of not using it i got it… i found jumping worms in it as well… and it was in the middle of a field with nothing around…strange.
Be careful with your manure/compost/woodchip mining…
Thing is a big bag of osmocote will last years, work well and it feeds for 6 months which is close to my entire season. Sure it does not last the entire season but by the end of the season the plants are winding down anyway. I believe our local gardening extension of CSU recommends not fertilizing after July so the plants can enter proper dormancy. Many organic ways of gardening will take years to form proper soil and fertilizer has to be applied on a constant basis. I remember getting a organic fertilizer once and it told me to apply once every 2 weeks to a month and it would expire at the end of the year. Things like manure are good over time but will take years of reapplying to set in. So what is my approach you may ask. My approach is use things like revive to naturally break down your soil over time if you have clay soil (revive is manure I believe but is easy to spread), use wood chips to help decompose on the soil and use fertilizer that lasts over the season to feed. That is what my family has done to our garden and the plants are doing amazing. The only things we struggle with is transplanted plants can get dehydrated for a year or two and will curl up until watered because we don’t like to water more than once of twice a week. The plants we do plant will get super established that way though which helps with nutrient issues as well.
It depends on the plant. Some need close to none; seaberries are nitrogen fixers and can take care of themselves. Some plants respond to dormancy signals strongly enough that it doesn’t matter. Some just keep pushing it until a freeze sends them into hibernation, excessive nitrogen playing no role in the matter. On some over fertilization even early in the season leads to the sort of growth that doesn’t build good winter hardiness. And finally those that in the presence of excessive nitrogen will be stupid enough to grow when they should not.
I’m done fertilizing most things, our season ends sometime in September (Alaska). The exception to that rule is raspberries; I have everbearing varieties that can soak up nutrients like nobody’s business. Feeding them even a month from now helps them to keep on pushing fruit this year, and more importantly to build the strong canes for next year. They will happily keep at ripening fruit and growth until first freeze, at which point they just go dormant.
I didn’t know seaberries are nitrogen fixers, I might go ahead and try them. I had dismissed them in the past because my property is low lying and often wet with heavy soil. Now, however, I have some additional land with a tall hillside and lighter soil. It’s a little on the dry side and might get very cold in the winter. I’m planning on a mix of low maintenance and medium maintenance stuff. Seaberries might work.
Thing about Seaberry is you need a male plant and a female plant. Also they are only good processed. I hear they basically make a great orange juice substitute but again we are talking about processing something. Plus you can make anything taste good with sugar so that is not saying much.
No biggie. Lemons are only good processed, nobody i know eats them fresh. The saving grace of seaberries is their nutritional density, they are like multivitamins.
I drink a glass of lemon water everyday, that’s how I keep the doctors away, lol.
Another consideration is that, given enough time, soils are generally and naturally regenerating. Nitrogen is fixed by symbiotic and nonsymbiotic microorganisms, and the soil’s rock matrix is a natural storehouse of minerals. The only problem is leaving enough time for a soil to regenerate. That’s where overpopulation and economic priorities throw a wrench in the works.
Another situation is the mining of phosphorus for fertilizer; those supplies will be exhausted at some point. It’s been suggested that “peak phosphorus” is soon to occur. On the other hand, waste products of civilization, including “humanure” plus a lot of organic materials that go into landfills, when composted, is rich is phosphorus (as well as potassium). Utilization of “waste” products of civilization could go a long way to maintaining fertility. It’s a social, political, and economic problem.
Left to it’s own devices a long time can indeed be a very long time. You can shorten many decades down to a few years with the correct inputs.
Very good points Lee. The challenge is that a geologic time scale does not play well with feeding people, especially when those people are generally uneducated about the benefits of utilizing waste in a form they’ve been told is “bad”. Even with all the discussion on this forum about using urine as fertilizer, we shy away (generally) from discussions about solid waste.
I should probably not have used the terms “regeneration.” What I meant was that soils can retain their fertility. Slash and burn agriculture is one example of this on a primitive basis. Crop rotations also can effect this. Given the waste products of civilization along with time and thoughtful crop rotations, fertility can be maintained. Perhaps, admittedly, not at the present population levels. Overpopulation is, in my opinion, responsible for many of the today’s ills, economic, political, and social.
I’m in the process of building a charcoal/biochar kiln to turn some of the wood my small forest keeps providing to turn it into a soil amendment. It also sequesters all that carbon for centuries.
I also use biochar on a regular basis and it is doing great things.
Sri Lanka has a lot of problems, but it doesn’t have to be that way. USSR cut off Cuba and they developed their own type of permaculture to feed themselves.
Right now in the US, almost all of our meat comes from CAFOs. They get the profit, the animals suffer greatly, and we pay for the environmental damage. When we actually had small farms, the right amount of anmials naturally and healthfully fertilizes the farm. It’s not an envirnomental crisis, it’s the ecosystem in balance. Any male can fertilize his 1/4 acre yard with urine. It’s been measured and studied, and I also use that method. We are nearing peak phosphorus. If we add too much phosphorus, we stop the natural mycorrizhae from developing it naturally. There are several large farmers like Gabe Brown, Mark Shepard and Will Harris that are using permaculture on a large scale, saving the ecology, and making a lot of money. We are moving in this direction. The only question is how much damage we will do until we develop these systems.
John S
PDX OR
The sad thing is that it is doable but unlikely that people would give up their social media and 10-second videos time in order to grow food. During WWII victory gardens, small plots at homes and farms, outproduced industrial farming fruits and vegetables. As a matter of fact at first the USDA was leery of Eleanor Roosevelt promoting them as they were afraid that it would take market share from industrial farming but as the war went on they embraced the idea as if they were onboard all along.
The challenge with victory gardens now is land and the time and knowledge it takes to grow stuff that I don’t think many would be able to do it. I also don’t think the nurseries would be able to keep up if we truly had a movement like before. So many have to save years to buy a house anymore. I have saved around 6 years for a house and still have a lot of money to save before I can put a true downpayment on a house let alone a house with actual land. The amount of time it takes for a perennial to produce many will not like as it takes 3-15 years depending on the plant. Many just simply don’t have the patience for that. Annuals will struggle to produce enough to sustain. In order to sustain yourself you also need to plant different crops or have multi grafted trees to increase the season. Again a land issue. You also have to maximize your space meaning have a tree then bush then ground cover and that will maximize your amount harvested. HOAs would through a fit if they saw that because it would look like a forest and not manmade. Then you need to know how to cultivate every plant. I have pretty much every plant there is that grows in my zone but I have two years of learning and am still learning. Some things overlap but others are a bit harder to get. Nurseries have not been able to keep up with edible plant needs for two years now. In the 2020 to 2021 year plants where sold out everywhere online by January 2021 and local nurseries sold out by June of 2021. 2021 into 2022 seemed to get better but some things still sold out very quickly. In the Fall of 2022 and 2022-2023 season it is worse than 2020-2021. I tried to buy Paw Paw trees from Peaceful Heritage Nursery and they sold out of them before I could even checkout and I was doing it within a hour or two after sales opened. When Raintree Nursery opened up they sold out of multi grafted pluots within a week of both varieties and many other trees are fully sold out already as well. Just imagine how hard it would be for nursery to keep up with demand like it was in WII if they cannot keep up with stuff now. With all of this we would have to change Americans mindsets. People like my grandma would rather grow nothing than get rid of her flowers and replace them with plants. I get a few berries year 1 on not very developed berry plants and I am happy. My grandma sees we get a few berries year 1 and she laughs at me and states we spend all that money and all we get is a few berries. Keep in mind my grandma is going to be the typical mindset of your average person in America.
It is absolutely about the long game.