The value of muck!
As horse owners, we spend much of our time removing droppings, collecting them in heaps, and often getting someone to take those away. However, those heaps contain valuable nutrients and organic material that can actually help to improve your pasture.
The quality of your muck will in part depend on the type of bedding you use in the stable and the amount of bedding you remove compared to droppings. Finer softer beddings like chopped straw, straw pellets, miscanthus, and hemp will also break down quickly, whilst large flake wood shavings can take a longer time to rot down.
Ideally, you want to spread your manure once it is well composted and starting to turn black, but it can still benefit your fields even if it is not fully rotted down. It's useful to carry out analysis on the manure and possibly the soils where you might want to spread, to ensure you apply at an appropriate rate to meet the fields’ requirements.
Many horse owners are concerned about the impact of manure spreading on worm management regimes. The heat from the composting process is known to kill worm eggs and larvae, meaning that well composted manure is safe to spread. If manure is spread at an earlier stage, resting the field prior to grazing is recommend to prevent any increase in worm burdens.
Safe and appropriate storage of manures is very important
It is highly regulated within the agricultural industry - however it’s not uncommon to meet horse owners that are unaware of the potential pollution risks and the environmental impacts of inappropriate storage.
The key aims should be to:
- Protect watercourses from contamination with manure
- Minimise and contain any effluent seepage
- Retain the nutrient content within the manure for spreading back to land in need
As a rule, field heaps should be located:
- A minimum of 10m from surface water (ditches, ponds, streams)
- 50m from a bore hole, well or spring
They should also be temporary, moving location annually to avoid soil contamination.
Many of us would love a dedicated roofed manure store, realistically that’s often not the case but there are things we can do to improve our storage and reduce the risk of pollution to our local environment.
So our key takeaways when it comes to manure storage are:
- Think about where you locate it - away from watercourses and yard drains
- Use the smallest footprint possible
- Take steps to reduce or contain any runoff, maybe by using a roofed or covered area
- Keep yards clean and guttering and drains in good maintenance
