Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 279, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1910 — HANDLING OF FARM MANURE [ARTICLE]

HANDLING OF FARM MANURE

Farmer Should Appreciate More Fully Its Value and Its Distribution Over Soil. (By M. F. MILLER.) The farmer should appreciate more fully the value of manure and of proper methods of handling it. He should figure it as worth at least two dollars per ton and should get that amount or in many cases much more than that out of it by proper handling. Just how it shall be handled will depend .upon conditions. The best methods where cattle ara fed in barns, sheds or lots, is to haul the manure to the fields, day by day. There is the least loss in handling it in this way. The next best plan is to feed under an open shed where the manure may accumulate and where it will be kept tramped down compactly by the animals. Under such a plan it will be kept sufficiently compact and moist to prevent rapid fermentation, and next to hauling it to the fields as made, this is the plan which gives the least loss of fertilizing constituents. One of the cheapest plans is to feed directly back of the fields but too often in this case the feeding is done on some hillside, where washing and leaching carries away the larger part of the fertilizing constituents contained, or the cattle are fed in some sheltered wood lot where the manure is lost to the fields. In this connection it should he said that a manure spreader will pay on the average farm of 100 acres or over, and where much stock is kept it will pay handsome returns on farms of much smaller size. MosJ men think that the value of a manure spreader lies in the saving of labor, and, while this is one importtant reason for its use, it is not the only one. - ‘ ~ A reason that is important is the fact that manure put on <*venly or rather lightly over a large area will give larger returns per ton of manure applied than the same manure put on heavily and irregularly over a smaller area. The difference in returns will frequently pay for the spreader in a single season. Another good reason why a man should own a spreader is that when he has money invested in such an implement he will almost invariably take better care of the manure his farm produces.