Using Hog Manure In Your Planter Fertility Program
22 Apr 245m 16s

Exploring an advanced manure management technique that processes hog manure to extract solids and subsequently utilizes the liquid for enhancing soil fertility.

00:00 Hi, this is Kelly Garrett from Extreme Ag. I'm here today, very interesting scenario. We're a little bit north of Obo, Iowa. 00:06 I'm with my two good friends, Matt Ro, we're on his farm, and Kurt Grim of Nutra Drip. 00:10 You're probably wondering why Kurt Grim is dressed like a marshmallow man. I will tell you that he wanted 00:15 to take this off before the video. I refused because this is a great look for Kurt Hannah and all the kids will really like this. 00:21 So we're here today. Behind us is Kurt's trailer, the nut nutri drip trailer. That is the screw press 00:27 for taking the solids outta hog manure. And over here they're putting the liquids from the hog manure. 00:32 After they take the solids out, of course the liquid is going into totes. There's about 5,500 gallons of liquid hog manure 00:40 that Matt is going to use for inf furrow fertility. This is a very outside the box scenario. I've done a lot of outside the box things in my day 00:47 and a lot of them have been with Kurt Grimm. So this is, uh, not even new territory for Kurt. Kurt, can you explain to us what's going on 00:53 here in, in better detail? Yeah, Absolutely. So we're sucking manure straight out of a deep pit hog barn. We've got a finishing barn wean 01:01 to finish barn behind us here. So we're sucking that liquid straight outta there. It goes through a screw press first, 01:06 which takes out the large particles that'll remove all the hair, all the, the big particles that are in there. 01:11 And then it goes through the micro filter and the micro filter takes out all the small particles. We've been working with this equipment 01:17 for about three years, perfecting it, getting to the point that we can take any kind of dairy, beef, hog manure 01:23 and run it through a subsurface drip irrigation system. That was our first goal and we've accomplished that over the last, um, couple years. 01:29 And then we met Matt and had some interesting ideas about what else could we do with this, um, what else can we do with this clean manure 01:37 and how else could we use it? And so that's why we're here today. Matt, what ideas 01:42 or what led you down this path to want to do this? Well, it's something I've been thinking about for several years. 01:47 I had thought about doing this on my own with some coffee filters in the shop just on a small scale to see what would happen. 01:53 And then through Kelly and the guys that integrated ag and extreme ag, I found Kurt and we got to talking and says, Hey, we got this equipment 02:01 that we can do this with. And final step here is 120 mesh screen. So we're not having stuff plugging up the planter. Right. 02:08 We very much believe this will go through the planter. Yeah. Yes. And so we're, we're filtering it very fine. 02:12 So we don't have that potential hiccup. I guess we're constantly looking for ways to use what we have here on the farm for fertility sources. 02:21 We already use the hog manure in traditional sense, knifing it in out on the ground and using it for NPK fertilizer. 02:27 But this is taking it one step further and making it more, I'm gonna say user friendly. It it's a sustainable 02:33 and renewable resource rather than using synthetic fertilizer. More cost effective to use what we grow here on the farm. 02:39 So you plan on putting five gallons an acre in furrow or what's the plan here? What the planner to do? Well we're, when we get this all separated out, 02:47 we're gonna take some analysis samples of the manure that's separated and see what the nutrient content of it is. But we're looking somewhere three 02:55 to five gallons per acre in furrow and probably run some two by two on the planter as well. 10 to 15 gallons per acre. 03:01 We may look at using some foliar feed or a wide drop, something like that later on in the season. Will you mix anything with it in for or two by two? 03:09 Are you gonna put any more biologicals with it or carbon sources, anything like that? We Plan to run some, some biological products 03:15 and some humic acid with it to help speed up the process and make it more readily available. 03:20 And, and Kurt, you were talking about before we started here, some of the products he's gonna use, you've used them in the greenhouse 03:26 and you've had pretty good success. Right. So we did some bench testing this winter in the greenhouse. 03:30 Um, we took some, uh, hog manure and some dairy manure. And Mike Evans with integrated ag sent us some, uh, vertex and we put that in with the manure. 03:38 And when we looked at control versus the manure application, there was a stark difference then it was even, 03:44 it was synergistic when we added some humate and some of that vertex biologicals with it. So it looks like there's some things we can do 03:50 to even speed up that process, make that more plant available. Hog Manure on steroids Hog. 03:55 That would be awesome. So, you know, when you talk about the regenerative aspects of this, the sustainable aspects of this, 04:02 and then when you talk about the economic margin here, we all know margins are tighter this year. This is a resource you've got on the farm. 04:09 You're not having to buy synthetic fertility and you're making use of what you've got rather than having to go spend a bunch of money, especially with 8% interest. 04:16 This would be interesting to run through a CI calculator. What, what is this doing for your CI score? 04:21 You know, especially when you're talking about your two by two, the inferral part of the CI score, I don't know if it's gonna do a tremendous amount, 04:27 but the part where you're putting this through your two by two and eliminating maybe synthetic nitrogen that very much could affect your CI score. 04:34 And Matt, I applaud your ingenuity here. I'm excited to see how this goes throughout the year. So are we, we're, we're really excited. 04:40 Kurt and I were talking last night a little bit about the economics of this and the raw product 04:44 that we're pumping out of this pit. We sampled earlier this spring and we put commercial fertilizer values 04:51 to it at 2000 gallons to the acre of that applied product. It values back at, just based on nitrogen, phosphorus, 04:58 potassium, and sulfur. That's in that raw hog manure, $125 per acre. The hog manure really has value, 05:04 much like the plant food byproduct that my guys are spraying on another field for you here. Yeah. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Exactly. 05:11 Here you're turning the hog manure into gold. Right.

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