The Magic Of Cow Manure As Garden Compost.

Cows are inexhaustible producers of cow manure as well as cow urine. In any given day of grazing in a field, being milked, and just being a cow and mooing about, a dairy cow can easily generate over 99 pounds worth of manure and, of course, cow urine.

As startling as these numbers are, it is not easy to dispose of so much manure and cow urine. However, farmers have devised a method of disposal that has worked very well for farmers centuries ago, and that’s using manure as compost.

Using manure as plant compost means that those cow wastes will need to be removed through a type of pressure washing from the area where the cows are maintained and milked.

Once the manure has been flushed away from the particular facilities, then those wastes, which are actually now composed as a semi-solid sludge, will be directed into holding ponds in order to wait for their final disposal, which can be accomplished through the following techniques.

First, this mixture may be spread by truck into a large field, resulting in a thin layer of it. Thus the nutrients may be absorbed as pure fertilizer by a variety of plants that are nitrogen-absorbing plants, such as alfalfa as well as other grasses.

Or, the manure mixture may be additionally diluted with water, and afterward it can be sprayed over any great region through the use of a center-pivot irrigation structure, that is ordinarily simply used to water growing plants.

This is recycling at its best, as the use of cow manure as compost in this way fertilizes the very grasses that the cows will eat. Unfortunately this washing and holding of the manure entails a unique problem--runoff of excess phosphorus and nitrogen going into watersheds.

What watersheds mean are the specific geographic areas that water flows across. This is any land where that water finally drains off into an ordinary body of water, which may be a lake, river, stream or even the ocean.

Therefore any recycling of manure to be used as garden compost needs to be performed diligently and extremely carefully so as not to pollute the watersheds. One farmer, and his brother, both living in Connecticut have actually turned their tons and tons of cow manure from their dairy into a very lucrative business. The take the manure and through a complicated scientific method, now make manure-based “CowPots,” which are totally biodegradable seed-starter containers.

The remarkable thing about these pots is that once the seeds take, they can be replanted directly into the ground in their own pots, and thus the tiny roots of the growing plant are never disturbed, thus the plant does not suffer from transplant shock, as many plants have.

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Using cow manure is very common, now used by homeowners, organic farmers, landscapers, golf course and vineyard owners, and of course nurseries. The listings of those who benefit from those raw materials, actual cow pies, are immeasurable. You may do the same by using cow manure as compost. Top of cow manure page