Boosting Soil Health with Eggshells as a Soil Amendment
5 Apr 24 • 1m 16s

Rich in calcium, nitrates, phosphorus, sulfur, and other vital nutrients, eggshells offer a promising replacement for lime, addressing soil's nutritional needs with organic forms of essential minerals. Despite the challenges of applying the wetter, harder-to-spread eggshells compared to dry chicken litter, Johnny Verell has high hopes that he may have found a new, more sustainable alternative to hard to find lime.

00:00 Johnny Rell, the extreme ag. You know, we're always looking for ways to be more efficient, get that ROI up higher, you know, 00:05 always look for new ideas of being more sustainable, right? So in our area in West Tennessee, we're always having 00:09 to fly lime every three, four years. Having to put out lime. Of course we ated and that saves us a lot of money. 00:14 And, you know, we've been looking at other things too. So over the past few years we've spread chick litter off and on depending on availability. 00:19 And then this year we came across eggshells. And so we started taking delivery of these eggshells here. And, you know, eggshells are great. 00:25 They got calcium in 'em, they got nitrate in 'em, they got phosphorous in sulfur. All kinds of other micronutrients 00:30 and macronutrients are, are based in these eggshells. So we pulled soil samples on our farm last fall and it was calling for a little bit of lime. 00:36 So we thought we'd put, for the most part, about a ton, a ton and a half to the acre on this far of these eggshells here to replace the lime needs we needed. 00:43 And on top of that, it's gonna start giving us, uh, more organic forms of your phosphorus, nitrates, stuff like that. 00:49 So we're giving it a shot. We're gonna see how it works. It's a lot wetter than chicken litter. 00:52 It's a little bit harder to apply. You can't go quite as fast. Uh, just 'cause the machine's having 00:57 to push it out a lot harder than it does with, uh, litter when it's so dry. But it's pretty neat. We'll see how it goes. 01:02 You know, you always try to think outside the box and, you know, always try to see what you can do to, to get that ROI up. 01:07 So, like I said, we're trying this out, seeing how it works.

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