Salt in Manure

AgPhD full episodes and more are now available on Acres TV, the newest ag platform connecting you to fields of information. Look for us on watchacres. tv. com. During our farm basics time today, we're going to talk about salt in manure. One of the wonderful things about livestock is you have manure. Well, it's wonderful if you aren't the one scooping it like Brian and I were when we were kids. — It's a good workout program. — We had a cow-calf operation. We had a farrow-to-finish hog operation. I loved the young animals. That part was great, but scooping the manure not so fun. But with that manure, we would spread it out in our crop fields because the manure has a lot of nutrients in it. Now, we had some livestock and quite a few crop acres accordingly, so it was no big deal. We just spread a little bit of manure all over and kind of rotated where we put it, and everything was fine. But now, we've got access to lots and lots of manure on our farm because we have a neighbor that has a large dairy. This is a wonderful thing. We can get nutrients for a low price. That's great. But the challenge is in manure, there's quite a bit of salt in there, so you have to be careful how much you put out on a field. — So, we have Midwest Labs based in Omaha, Nebraska. They test the manure for us all throughout the fall as we're pumping that manure into our fields. But one of the things they say right at the bottom of their manure test is you don't want to exceed, or their recommendation at least is to not exceed 500 lb of salt per acre. So, if let's say you are a farmer and you're getting a manure test, the most important thing we want to see on that manure test isn't the nutrients. And granted, we need that information, too, to make a good recommendation. But what we need to see is how much salt is in there. How many pounds of salt are there in however many gallons, in 1,000 gallons, or however much you're going to apply. — Now, Brian mentioned a salt limit and just say it's 500 lb per acre per year. That's if you get 25 in of rain or more. Now, that doesn't always happen and it certainly doesn't happen in every area where crops are grown. If you've got a low moisture environment, you're getting 10 to 15 in, you probably have to cut that back quite a bit. — Okay, so the reason why we're talking about this today, this is our Farm Basics segment and we gear this part of the show to non-farmers. So, if you are a non-farmer, we just want you to understand one of the things that we use as a management practice on our farm and that we advise farmers to do. It's not enough to say, "Oh, we have manure. We're just going to go throw it out on the field and we have no idea how much or what's in there or anything else. " No, everything we do on the farm anymore, it's about precision agriculture. We want to know exactly what we're putting on the farm. Not just for nutrients, but also for salt because if you overdo the salt, what ends up happening is you dramatically hurt your crop, you hurt your soil, you hurt the health of your soil for the long term. It's not a good thing. So, as farmers, we have to be smart about all these decisions that we make. — And one other thing we have to be smart about is stopping our weed of the week. Can you identify this week's weed?