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Successful Manure & Waste Management
Toxins Can Show Up in All Kinds of Forage
December 12th, 2007 by peter
WSU instructor alerts members of weed association to dangers.
“In the tangled world of toxic and noxious weeds, it is better to kill than be killed”, says Patricia Talcott, instructor of toxicology and veterinary medicine at Washington State University.
“When a horse breeder loses 25 of 28 foals, or a cattle rancher loses 100 cows in a 24-hour period, it’s time to get serious about toxic weeds”, said Talcott, citing two actual incidents of animals encountering toxic plants. ”Plants are not the only killers. Pesticides have a long history of killing animals”.
The complete article was published in the November 21, 2007 issue of the Capital Press. For details, click here.
When it comes to pasture management, there is nothing more challenging than importing toxic and noxious weed seeds to your farm in bales of forage. Weed seeds generally pass through the horse’s gut unchanged and when raw manure is spread out on the pasture, so are the seeds. In fact, weed seeds do accumulate in the soil and can survive for many years until conditions are just right for them to germinate and grow. Soil scientists refer to this accumulation of weed seeds as the “seed bank”; and this is the reason that weeding a garden bed is a never-ending process.
The only way to effectively eliminate these troublesome weed seeds is through a heat pasteurization process, and the easiest way to accomplish this is by thoroughly composting the manure.
With the O2compost aerated composting system, fresh air (i.e. oxygen) is introduced throughout the mix of materials using an electric blower. The oxygen stimulates the micro-organisms that are already in the mix, and their by-product is heat. In a properly operated compost system, pile temperatures are sufficient to pasteurize the raw material, and the oxygen-rich conditions within the core of the pile eliminate offensive odors. High temperatures also destroy fly larvae and degrade most pesticides and herbicides, improving your horses’ health and yielding a safe, high-quality finished product. For more information on aerated composting, visit: www.o2compost.com.
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