Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
HANDLING MANURE
There are basically five ways to manage manure: give it away, let it lie, haul it away, spread
it fresh, and compost it.
Give it away.
If you are in an area where gardening is popular and you make access to
the manure pile easy, you might be able to give away all the manure your horses produce.
Let it lie.
This second option relates to manure deposited on pastures and is viable only
if you have very large pastures. If you had four horses on 100 acres, they would tend to
create areas where they defecate, areas where they lie and rest, and preferred grazing areas.
Generally, given enough room, horses do not contaminate their eating areas. But few of us
are fortunate enough to have so much pasture. On medium-sized horse operations, larger
groups of horses tend to be turned out on smaller pastures. When nine head are turned out
on 2 acres, even for a few hours each day, the manure accumulates quickly. Yet it is imprac-
tical to manually pick up manure on a daily basis from a 2-acre pasture. The best option is
to let it lie where it fell. If you can afford to leave a pasture vacant for a year, harrow the
manure to spread it more evenly over the pasture. But you wouldn't want to do this and
then immediately use the pasture for grazing, because you would have just helped parasites
continue their life cycles by distributing the parasite eggs and larvae over the entire pasture.
A covered can on wheels makes it convenient to collect manure regularly.
