Composting chicken manure provides rich, nitrogen-laden compost. This is especially great for those areas of your garden where you will plant heavy nitrogen feeders like corn or popcorn. Since chickens create a lot of manure, they provide free fertilizer for the homesteader. When we clean out the barn or coops, we add it to the vermicomposting bins composting with worms.
Using worms for composting is one of the best decisions we have made for the health of our garden soil. They are especially beneficial in preparing horse manure for gardens. Of the many things we have added to our vermicomposting bin, we have found they love horse manure better than most other things. While you may think this should be common sense, it needs to be said because of the high risk of diseases being transferred to humans from the feces of dogs and cats.
The high nitrogen and ammonia levels can kill your plants at the root. Not even composting it, remove it from your homestead to prevent the spread of disease or sickness. Do you have a tip for using manure in the garden or in composting? In fact, I could not even find values for the organic matter of different manures. The closest I found are values for the dry matter content, which should be fairly close to the organic matter level.
Chicken has the highest value, probably because a lot of their manure consists of bedding material. So which manure is best for organic matter? Try to find the NPK of composted manure. So how is it that discussions on social media always compare the nutrient levels of manure from various animals? The NPK values of fresh manure are readily available and this is what most people use to compare manures.
But such comparisons are only valid if you use fresh manure. I did not find a single product that had a different ratio. Many products have no NPK listed on the package or in the online information and none of the bulk products provided the NPK. The NPK value for any particular type of manure can vary wildly because it depends on the type of animal , type of feed, age of animal, degree of composting and amount of urine collected.
So a grass fed horse will produce different manure than one fed on alfalfa and grain. The important point here is that if you buy composted manure, it all has about the same NPK. The fact that fresh cow might have a better NPK than fresh horse is immaterial.
What if you start with fresh manure and hot compost it yourself? Your starting material will depend on the source, but a lot of the nitrogen is lost during the composting process. Even P and K are lost. Hot manures have a low C:N ratio and to compost properly you need to add more carbon, which has the effect of reducing the relative nitrogen level. Rabbit manure may be the exception since it does not need to be composted before being used. Herbicides are used to control weeds in forage animal feed and then this plant material is fed to animals.
Some herbicides can survive the whole process including composting , resulting in manure that harms plants, especially seedlings. It is important that manure is herbicide free, making this one of the most important selection criteria.
How do you know it is herbicide free? Most certified manure has been tested for herbicides but a lot of commercial manure is not certified. You can do a simple test to see if the finished compost contains herbicide. All farm animals may contain administered antibiotics and none of these animals completely digest the antibiotics so it ends up in their manure.
Manure from organically raised animals should be free of antibiotics. The high heat of hot composting does degrade antibiotics. Cold composting is much less effective. Fresh manure and cold composted manure ie aged will contain larger amounts of antibiotics.
Hot c omposted manure has much lower levels, but it still contains some. The answer is a clear yes and it seems as if higher concentrations in soil result in higher concentrations in plants. O rganic farms do use manure from animals that have been given antibiotics.
The level of antibiotics found in vegetables is very low, and should not be a concern. But keeping antibiotic levels low in your soil is a valid goal. Bacteria, that are known human pathogens, include certain strains of E. Protozoa include Giardia and Cryptosporidium. Most viruses found in animal manure do not infect humans.
The type and the amount of pathogen varies a lot. For example E. Camplyobacter is common in poultry manure but can be found in all species.
If you are using manure you have a potential exposure to pathogens — no fresh manure is free of them. Most pathogens die on their own within a year and many die sooner. At higher temperatures, their life expectancy is reduced to weeks or even days. I see claims that the degree of digestion is an important factor. Some say ruminant manure such as cattle, sheep and goat, is best because it goes through a more efficient digestive system.
Horses, for example, have a less efficiency system and a lot of what goes in, comes out, undigested. If you take plant material and compost it — taking the animal our of the loop — you get good compost. This seems to indicate that the degree of digestion is not an important factor. The type of food eaten by the animal is probably more important. Manure is rarely just manure. It is almost always mixed with some type of bedding material.
The amount of this, and the type are also important, and most of this is undigested. From an environmental point of view and from a cost point of view, the best manure is the one you can get easily. There really is no point driving out of your way to get a manure that is marginally better than the one close at hand.
For many gardeners this means getting bagged manure at the local grocery store or nursery. Some manure has higher levels of weed seed than others, but this is a non-issue in a properly mulched garden.
Hot composting also kills most weed seed. Lets return for a moment to the assumption I made early on, namely that we only need to consider composted manure. If you decide to use fresh or aged manure, then there might be some minor differences to consider. Manures can be added to the garden when preparing new beds and as a boost during the growing season. Making a manure tea is an easy way to add the benefits of manure without digging it in. Clarence shows how you can get the benefits of using horse manure on the garden, without getting the weeds!
Josh Byrne loves having chicken at his home in Perth, and particularly loves being able to reuse their manure in the garden. He makes liquid manure using a handful of chicken poo in a watering can.
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Other hot manures include those from birds, like geese, ducks, and pigeons. Cold Manures Cold manures are lower in nutrients than hot manures. No-go Manures Manures from cats, dogs, and omnivores like humans and pigs should not be used as they contain harmful bacteria and other pathogens.
Aging Manures All manures need to be well-aged before use in the garden. Making Manure Tea Manures can be added to the garden when preparing new beds and as a boost during the growing season. Submerge it in a bucket of water for a few hours. When I tried it with tomatoes, the tomatoes grew into huge plants that produced a delayed crop because of excessive nitrogen from the manure.
One of the challenges of using animal manures directly in the garden is guessing at how much to use, which varies with the type of manure and the next crop to be planted. Root crops often react badly to fresh manure of any kind, evidenced by twisted carrots and scabby potatoes. Composting manure before you use it, or simply allowing it to rot, reduces health risks and benefits the garden, too. My neighbor buys a load of cow manure in the fall, and lets it sit through the winter before digging it into her garden in early spring.
Simply aging a manure pile for three months can kill about 60 percent of the weed seeds present, and bacterial counts start to drop within days after the manure leaves the animal. Then, when the aged manure is mixed into the soil, soil microorganisms clear out residual bacteria in about a month. Yet the safest approach is to compost manure until it heats up, either by itself or combined with other materials.
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