HAMILTON, Ohio – The Butler Soil and Water Conservation District held an ag day breakfast at the Beiser Farm on March 18 to show farmers across a three-county region what value animal manures bring to their farm as a resource rather than a waste product, said Brady Smith, rural specialist for the district.

“With the issues we’ve seen with nutrient loading in Lake Erie, Grand Lake St. Marys, and even now the Gulf of Mexico, people at both a national and state level are looking at where we are losing nutrients and how we can keep them on the farm,” Smith said.

Glen Arnold, field specialist in manure nutrient management systems with Ohio State University Extension, talked about making better use of the nutrients in manure; Frances Springer, Grand Lake St. Marys nutrient management specialist with the Ohio Department of Agriculture, focused on different best management practices and preventing nutrient runoff.

Arnold explained that liquid hog manure especially has a lot of nitrogen and the farmer can put that on a growing crop and capture that value.

However, if a farmer applies manure in the fall it can lose 50 percent of the nitrogen over the winter, Arnold said. It is better to put it on the growing crop. The earliest the researchers use manure on test plots to top dress wheat is about the first week in April.

“In Ohio, we generally will put about 110 to 120 pounds of nitrogen per acre on a wheat crop,” he explained. “Usually that is urea, sometimes it is 28 percent urea ammonium nitrate. We can put about 4,000 gallons of swine finishing manure on that wheat and get the same amount of nitrogen and you already own that manure. We can splatter that with a drag hose.”

Farmers can also put dairy manure on wheat and they would put that on about the same time, the first of April, and the dairy farmers will often come by with a second application, Arnold said. Even though the wheat, is taller farmers can still drag that hose across it.

Usually dairy farmers are going to make wheatlage off that field, he said. They will put two applications of dairy manure on that to provide nitrogen that wheat needs and they will also have some starter nitrogen for the corn that is going to be planted in that field as soon as the wheatlage has been harvested.

The next application is right after crops are planted and that is usually about the first of May; farmers can splatter manure on newly planted corn and soybeans. 

“This is at the start of May and what we’re doing is extending our manure application season,” he said. “We’re trying to make more days available in the growing season to apply manure to farm fields.”

The next application season is when it’s time to side-dress corn either with a manure tanker or with drag hose systems. Farmers can inject that manure directly into the soil or splatter it on top of the corn.

After harvesting the wheat crop, many farmers will double-crop soybeans. They can shoot manure on top of the soybeans right after they’re planted. That provides moisture and a little bit of nitrogen to get them growing.

One more window would be to apply manure just ahead of planting wheat or cover crops to give them some nitrogen and moisture to come out of the ground.

Springer talked about different Best Management Practices (BMP) and ways to prevent nutrient runoff with manure applications. She explained the different types of manure spreaders that have come on the market, and new and different evaluation tools.

“Some of the technology has evolved that we can evaluate how applications are spread and how they are being utilized by the crops when we go into harvest them,” Springer said. “We can see those results on yield monitors.

“I think that manure application statewide is starting to evolve,” she said. “In the last couple years, we have learned some lessons about BMPs as far as manure applications and handling and storage in the Grand Lake area. Then we shifted over to the Lake Erie watershed and now we’re seeing a bigger shift around the state.”

Some farmers are hesitant to be on the cutting edge of these BMPs; they want to see results. Researchers are starting to see those results on those watersheds and how things can be adapted and managed at the field level.

The use of drones is one example of that. Farmers and researchers can fly a drone over a field and see what kind of application they have done.

“We can see the areas of the field that we missed or that we got heavy on or that might not be producing as much and we can start to variable-rate those applications like we’ve been able to do on the commercial fertilizer side. I would think those things are starting to benefit the farmers that are handling manure and it is also allowing more acres to receive manure because of that technology.”

Also, farmers are talking about these things and sharing the news faster than in the past, Springer said. She thinks they’re doing a better job of information sharing.

“I can go out and share photos with one group and another part of the state will see them that same day or the next day,” she said. “It is just a lot faster transition and information sharing than what it has been in the past.”