By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

TOLEDO, Ohio — The Ohio State University Extension Service will receive a $42,000 Ohio EPA grant for a project designed to benefit crops and reduce runoff. It will do this by changing how farmers use manure on growing fields in the late spring and early summer.

Glen Arnold, extension field specialist and associate professor at OSU, applied for the grant for work he has been doing with livestock manure. For the last five years, he has been using liquid manure on corn as a sidedress source of nitrogen.

Farmers typically plant corn in late April or May and then sidedress with nitrogen. Arnold had been doing the same, but with manure. He wants to open new windows of application times so more manure can be applied to a growing crop.

“The farmer can purchase less commercial fertilizer,” he explained. “We inject the manure in the ground to a depth of about 4 inches. We’re very comfortable that it stays right there and is utilized by the crop.”

Sam Custer was in his first year as a Darke County extension agent when he began to line up producers who would “let us experiment in their fields,” he said. There were problems sidedressing the corn in the first field; Custer feared he was not making a good first impression. But farmer Tom Hubbard made mechanical changes to the applicator, and injecting manure in the next fields went better.

“Later when we went back and saw results as the corn was growing, things looked good,” Custer said. “As it always is, when you’re doing randomized plots, it is what is coming in the combine.

“When we shelled corn that fall, even in the field that we were in first and struggled with the process, the yields there were very comparable to that of commercial fertilizer. When we moved into our second, third and fourth fields the swine manure out-yielded the 28 percent nitrogen.”

Hubbard plans to sidedress manure on more fields next year. He had never put manure on standing corn before, and it worked well. He didn’t have to put any commercial fertilizer on that land.

“We did several check strips, and the manure was as good as or better than any check strip that we did the conventional way, applying nitrogen and commercial fertilizer,” Hubbard said. “The yield was better. We made a tool that we do seven rows at a time and inject it in the ground. We slice the ground, inject the manure and the closing discs close it up.”

Arnold’s goal was to show farmers it is possible to get good yields by applying manure in the late spring and early summer. The long-term goal is to get the commercial manure application industry involved.

“If you look around the state, we haul close to a billion gallons of swine manure every year,” he said. “You’ve got a commercial industry, people that have businesses that haul manure for a living and do a good job. They used drag hoses.

“We think we’re going to get to the point soon where we can have a farmer plant the field. The next day the commercial drag hose person can come and apply the manure to the corn so it will be there for the growing corn.”

The EPA grant is an opportunity for Arnold to do more test plots so farmers can see it firsthand. “That will get the farmer thinking about how they can make better use of their livestock manure,” he pointed out.