Self-sustaining fertility
 

Does your homestead produce sufficient manure and composts to consistently meet the fertility needs of your homestead? What percentage of your fertilizers are produced on the farm?

Thanks,
Steve

Mine sure don't, wish they did. I'd say around 30% maybe. Did you mean compost also?


Billy

yes, i compost everything i can. spring barn cleaning is a big source too. plus i keep rabbits for no other reason than gathering their poop.

Because of our heavy rainfall and long rainy season many minerals get leached out of our soil. Therefor to be a closed circle is impossible. So we bring in organic fertilizer components suchas cottenseed meal, kelp meal, etc. It makes up about 10% of our fertilizer needs, the rest we get from the cows, goats, chickens and rabbits.

compost
 

Oh yeah, One year we had a goat that died in January and the ground was frozen.No buring her We wrapped her up and she stayed in a truck bed for almost a month.We had to do something with her so we started a compost pile on top of her.The compost piles grew from there.My DH liked the Idea of not digging a hole every time something died.He started picking up city residents leaves and grass they set out at the curb.Clean out the chicken house and the goat barn add to it.The pile so far is 8 foot wide and 20 feet long and growing.I think he has 12 more bags of leaves piled in the barn drive.Something dies it is taken to the pile, and dig hole in pile, and cover with lime, and bury it, no smell.

Your needs will vary a lot depending on what you do with the fruit of your land.
For example:
If you are grazing animals who in turn are manuring the land, you would need far less than if you are cutting and selling off your hay.

min is right.

i'd like to amend my post. :) all i am growing is the family garden, so i have plenty for our needs.

We don't produce enough. We have 12 compost heaps (I need to build more) and 1 chicken house. We still bring in truck loads of manure and finished compost every year, along with bags of corn gluten meal and jugs of fish emulsion. If we were just growing for ourselves we would probably produce more than enough, but we run a CSA and are probably producing abut 30% of our needs.

Dumb question maybe, but I just gotta know.

I have a horse and poultry that make lots of manure for the compost pile.
And I have goats - the goats produce great amounts but their berries don't seem to break down and mix in like the horse and poultry products do.

Even after months they just sit there in little pelleted form. Also they usually come with quite a bit of straw, which seems to take forever to break down also.

The worm manure on the other hand is working out GREAT! I love those little guys...

Three big horses, and 30 chickens, that, with the compost makes my 30 raised beds just fine.
does anyone else wonder about e-coli tho? never had it--just wonder--

No, not by a long shot. My soil is sand/gravel, and is pretty low in N, and in organic matter.

Dunno, maybe 5%?

Sounds like you need more N in your pile, and quite possibly more water.

Poop
 

Well...yes and no. We raise 2 acres of corn for farmer's markets and our dairy neighbor has a liquid manure tank. In the spring our field is not too wet for him to spread when he needs a "dry" place. Works for both of us. Our horses, goats, chickens, ducks, geese and rabbits, along with leaves picked up (all baged) in town, provide 100% for all other...Joan

Not even close yet, but I'm working on it. Likely take some years to approach closing the circle, but I doubt that I'll ever be able to fully close it.

.....Alan.

Steve - Yes I think you are right...I am going to work on getting more moisture in the pile - thanks

Uhm, Joan, "leaves picked up (all baged) in town" aren't "produced on the (presumably your) farm". :hobbyhors :rolleyes:

I haul hundreds of cubic feet of compostables (leaves & wood chips, mostly) every year, and they all (just about, anyway) end up on my 125' by 50' garden.

Edited to add: All you guys with livestock - if your feed is sourced off-farm (my GF probably buys in 70% of her feed, for instance), your manure is really from 'off the farm', too.

I've just been thinking about this a little, and the concept of -

Is kind of an oxymoron.

I mean, except for the N that's fixed naturally (rain/snowfall, soil bacteria, etc.) all we can really do is try to keep it on our place. When we compost/covercrop/rotational graze, aren't we just stockpiling/preserving, instead of producing?

Having no livestock, I gather up and deposit many dozens of cubic yards of leaves and duff from the nearby woods and spread on the gardens each year, although thats just robbing one place to build up another

and this year will likely use 60 to 80 bags of Black Kow and maybe 80 pounds of store bought bone meal for a garden of something more than one acre.

I have gotten dumptruck loads of manure before and may try that again.

From the way I understand it, the only volitile nutrient is nitrogen, all of the others will (for the most part) stay in place as long as you compost your wastes and prevent massive amounts of runoff. To preserve nitrogen you have to bind it with carbon (also very important but not a nutrient per se)in the form of living matter (animals/green leaves), or composting. Any odor from manure/compost is the smell of nitrogen getting away in the form of ammonia, and more carbon (leaves, straw, sawdust) is needed to bind it. Many times people see massive improvement when they add carbon based materials because it facilitates nitrogen retention as well as improving the "structure" of the soil allowing it to retain more air and water as well. The only way to "make" new nitrogen (other than synthetic fertilizer) is with legumes(clover, alfalfa, vetch, lespezda, trefoil, soybeans, locusts, ect..)who use sunlight to produce sugar that feeds bacteria on their roots. This bacteria takes atmospheric nitrogen and "fixes" it so that plants can use it. So having enough nitrogen (hence fertility) boils down to growing enough legumes, and after that all you can do is do your best to retain it. Retaining carbon is similar, the only real difference any plant can capture it out of the air on it's own, the key here is just to produce "biomass" which can be added back to the soil. Once again, this is only my understanding, is anyone knows different please let me know!

Eggzackery. :)

We produce enough for ourselves and sell or barter a lot also. We have 21 mini jerseys, 3 draft horses plus assorted chickens, ducks and turkeys. We do buy fish fertilizer to run in our drip lines for the produce. WE just run a weak concentration through the summer.

nitrogen and potash are not problem as i have plenty of poo and wood ashes. i do need to suppliment phosphorous.

Marvella -

How many rabbits do you have? Do they really make that much poo?

Our place has been a closed loop for over 15 years, except for what feed we purchase off farm.

Now, according to the post above-if you have to "buy" anything, ie, feed, wood, etc, it dosent qualify as "being from your farm."
not sure where he lives, but here in the ozarks, if you dont buy anything to feed your cattle/horses/hogs/chickens, someones going to come calling. it would take few animals--or a big farm to be completely self-sustaining, under these standards.

Not buying ANYTHING is pretty unrealistic. Even when we grew all the feed for our goats, we still bought kelp and molasses to add to the feed and an occasional bag of rabbit pellets and laying mash. Do I get debited for all the deer poop in my woods that the deer leave there after eating in the neighbor's corn field? :baby04:

100% here, and enough to give away on Craigslist. All organic. 24 acres, half in pasture, 7 acres of woodlot - ash, vine maple, birch, lots and lots and lots of leaves, 2 acre truck garden, barns, paddocks. Horses, dairy goats with associated bedding (organic feeds only), chickens penned 12 hours a day, free range in the garden areas. Rabbits in open dirt floored barn, earthworm beds, rolling compost bins, sheep. Manure management takes up bit of time, most people neglect to "collect". It's a toss up, keeping animals penned up on bedding/ in paddocks, but loose fewer to predators.

A dozen large breed rabbits, kept in hanging wire cages over dirt, will yield about 4 toyota truck beds of pure manure a year. I know this because it's my son's job (and his truck) to shovel it out every three months. :)

If you have animal products leaving your farm, then it balances out the input of feed. Eggs, milk, meat go OUT of this loop in larger quantities than feed in brought in.

Are you referring it me, or Matt, or somebody else? I'm in NY, he's in NC.

Uhmm, I was trying to say that if you bring OM onto the farm, it came from off the farm. How does that not make sense?

It's not an 'all or nothing' kind of thing. If some came from off the farm, that portion came from off the farm. I just think that running purchased hay through a goat and saying "I produced that manure here" is a little like saying "Milk comes from the store". You're ignoring how it got there. :shrug:

The original question was "What percentage of your fertilizers are produced on the farm?"

Not really. You could just be poor/inefficient. After all, that IS how it was done, not all that many years ago.

There is some pretty cool research on full sustainability based on families living in India, where people did it because they had to in order to survive. I can't quite remember where i saw it but you could probably google it. I have also heard accounts of 10 people living off of 1 acre in China, once again I can't cite references, but sure sounds interesting.