POOPED OUT. Cattle standing at the edge of their pen, as rain water washes manure into the narrow basin, and on down into a hayfield.
Woodbury/USDA
Posted on 11/09/2007 8:29:25 PM PST by neverdem
As any pet owner knows, the more food that goes into an animal's mouth, the more wastes that eventually spew out the other end. The bigger the animal, the bigger its appetite. So imagine the volumes of manure—often tainted with germs—that farmers must manage for even a small feedlot with perhaps 3,500 head of cattle.
Ordinarily, beef producers house their animals in pens—some the size of football fields or larger. They're designed to leave each animal about 80 square feet of space. Cattle wastes just fall to the ground and collect—often for a month or more—before feedlot crews periodically scrape away the muck. After composting, the dried manure will be applied to fields as a rich fertilizer.
The real problem develops when it rains. Then, a manure-rich, watery slurry can drain off the fields. Conventionally, feedlot managers would divert this liquid into huge, smelly ponds or lagoons—some 10-feet deep or more, explains Bryan L. Woodbury, an agricultural engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Nebraska.
His team has been developing a literally greener alternative to pond storage for manure-laced runoff from feedlot pens. The new system directs that runoff into a foot-deep drainage basin. Leading out of it are a series of narrow pipes. Because the interior diameters of these pipes are small, rain-deposited wastes temporarily back-up in this glorified drainage ditch. It typically takes hours for all of the liquids to fully drain out through the pipes. While they wait, solids in the rain-manure slurry tend to settle out as sediments that will accumulate on the basin's bottom.
Exiting liquids, meanwhile, flow gently into a mildly sloping field of grass, where the animal wastes will fertilize the plants' growth. At the end of the season, farmers harvest that grass as hay, bale...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Thanks for the link.
Could someone please photoshop a sign on that fence that says “Democratic Party Ideas” or something similar..... :^)
This is bullshit!
News flash! Scientific study says barnyards are full of crap!
awesome...tomatoes the size of a soda flat
The farms around us have been sold to a corporation. One by one as the owners died or retired farms were sold. The liquid manure is spread many more times a year now. The tractors are huge and the tires leave the residue on the roads. The rain brings the sludge into the streams and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. We have lived on our small farm for 30 years. The odors produced by the manure choke us. We cancelled several family gatherings because it is so gross. They allow it to sit on the ground and do not turn the soil. ( they do not have to turn the soil I am told by the health dept.) We are now surrounded by an enormous operation. We will be selling within the year.
I grow tomatoes, but what’s a soda flat?
“We call it Underworld. That’s where Bartertown gets its energy.”
“What, oil? Natural gas?”
“Pigs.”
“You mean pigs like those?”
“That’s right.”
“Bulls**t!”
“No. Pig s**t.”
“What?”
“Pig s**t. The lights, the motors, the vehicles, all run by a high-powered gas called methane. And methane cometh from pig s**t.”
soda flat=must be a southern thing!!! the cardboard thing that they deliver a case of soda cans in..... I did beefsteak tomatoes several years ago turned out almost a foot across. 2 to the soda flat....... but i used road apples as fertilizer......
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