Using Hog Manure In Your Planter Fertility Program

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.