Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

Now that is funny!

Blenheim Orange Loc: Michigan

How about those tart cherry trees in bloom?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

reported too ...

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

They are gorgeous! I can't wait for spring here. This winter has mostly been one long, long gray stretch of gloom.

bikinkawboy Loc: north central Missouri

Blenheim, where were the tractor photos taken at? I’ve never seen a John Deere cab that looked like that nor like the one on the New Holland. The latter looks European to me.

Blenheim Orange Loc: Michigan

Michigan. Standard model tractors.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

@Linda

When I lived in Yakima I worked for the fertilizer manufacturer in Moxee. This should be my kind of topic. Trouble is I don't have photos of the experience. I'd given up film and my darkroom for the move to Yakima and I hadn't started with digital yet.

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

I take back my comment on your other thread. This had to be your worst yet.

foathog Loc: Greensboro, NC

I was looking forward to possibly answering you. i'm a master gardener. However, I have been exiled from the "general chit chat" room. Banned for life apparently. God forgives but UHH is forever.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Nice spreaders. I had an old JD spreader that I used until it completely rotted out. It was similar to the New Holland you have pictured and was PTO driven but used a chain drive to move the manure to the back where the beaters would throw it around. It had a gate just before the beaters to meter the output. The gate doubled as a shield because the beaters threw stuff forward just as much as backward. The problem with that style of spreader was that when you get down to the end of the load, the spread rate would decrease so you had to adjust the tractor speed to compensate.

A friend had a spreader with a hydraulic pusher, so I got to borrow that occasionally. That solved the variable feed rate for the load.

One time I was getting chicken from an egg producer. That sort of manure is not like horse or cow manure, which is made up of fibrous vegetable matter (the horse manure is just shredded vegetation, the cow manure is digested a couple times so it's more uniform in consistency). The pullet manure is thixotropic. Kind of like butterscotch pudding. If you let it sit, it gels, but once disturbed it becomes fairly liquid. As a consequence, it doesn't work at all in the spreader I referred to at the beginning of this post. You load it in, it just runs out on its own. There was a horse farm nearby, so we used to mix chicken and horse manure. I found the ratio 1 chicken to 2 horse (by volume) to work pretty well. Horse manure is full of weed seeds so mixing chicken (high nitrogen) with horse (high carbon) would generate a quick high temperature compost which reduced the weed load and made the resulting consistency more amenable to the spreader. The egg farm was happy to get rid of the manure. They gave it away free, but we had to pay the trucking. I would get two 18 wheeler loads a year. The semi-liquid nature of the manure made it difficult to transport. You had to be very careful with acceleration and braking.

The best solution to the chicken manure was when we rented a side slinger. Looked similar to the spreader in the last photo. The manure went into the trailer. There was an auger at the bottom of the trailer that drove the manure up toward an opening where there was a rotary beater that would take the manure and sling it to the side. It would generate a plume of chicken manure rain that would go about 30' to the side and resulted in a really nice uniform application.

Unfortunately that was used long before I was in the habit of taking photos of the farm so I have no extant photos of my operation then. Also long before I went digital.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

PS: The egg farm went out of business so the chicken manure was no longer available. But other egg producers have taken to partner with local sawmills. They keep their chicken manure and mix it with sawdust and compost it, then sell the product as fertilizer. By the time it's composted it can be pelletized and it's easy to handle. They can sell it now so they don't give it away free.

Blair Shaw Jr Loc: Dunnellon,Florida

bikinkawboy Loc: north central Missouri

I like the doctored photo of the car pulling the manure spreader. Maybe some manufacturer will start selling cars with a PTO shaft and remote hydraulics.

On the subject of manure, if you graze sheep don’t spread poultry manure on the pasture. It has high levels of copper and that kills sheep.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When we moved from the city to the country my wife got the idea she'd like some sheep.
While looking at houses we came across one house that kept about 6 sheep.
They were so noisy she dropped that specification.

But eventually I bought some tractors.

The town we moved to considered itself a rural community. In actual fact it was a bedroom community for the nearby city. I eventually developed my own personal definition of a rural community:

A rural community is one in which more than 10% of the families own and operate one or more pieces of heavy machinery. For the purposes of that definition, heavy machinery requires in excess of 25 HP. (I excluded snow plows with fewer than 3 axles from that definition).

goofybruce

...one of the first 'aromas' of spring....breaking open the manure pile which built up over winter.... yup, nothing like the smell of fermenting male bovine dung in the morning!!!