Manure

What do you do with all that cow poop?

Many times we get asked the question “What do you do with all the poop from the cows?”.

The pictures below are a visual of how we turn what many think of as waste into a nutrient for our crops in our quest to be a sustainable and friendly to the environment dairy farm.

Cows poop it's just part of nature.

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Making the Cow Beds

Here is a look into what goes into providing the cows on our farm clean soft comfortable beds to lie in. The pictures are from start to finish and show how we take solid manure sterilize and dry it, with a process similar to composting, the finished product is essentially soil we then use for bedding. On our farm we use 95% of the solid manure from the cows as bedding as an effort to recycle all we can and leave a minimal environmental footprint.

With use the cows tend to mess up their beds, we keep trying to get them to make their beds but to no avail.

The first thing we do is put down Hydrated Lime to dry out any wet spots, yes cows do occasionally wet the bed.

Next we mix the Lime in with what we call the Freestall Groomer, we use this piece of equipment 3 times a week to re groom the beds.

Here is what the beds look like after being groomed.

The next piece of equipment adds more bedding to the stalls.

This is the finished product a clean soft bed for the cows to lie in.

We use a process similar to composting to dry and sterilize the bedding prior to it's use.

Related articles

• Composted manure is the gardener’s best friend (sfgate.com)
• Hints, Tips and Advice on Using Manure in Your Garden (brighthub.com)

Planting the garden – Farm style!

Just remembered I had this post saved as a draft and never published it, silly me!

Here are some pictures of how we prepped the soil (using a little overkill) for our garden.

We like to go BIG on the farm!

 We use our loader to get a scoop of the compost we make from the manure our cows leave behind.

Adding our own compost to the garden.

 We mixed the compost into the soil to add vital nutrients that allows our vegetables to grow.

Ready to plant!

The finished product!

Related articles

• What do you do with all that cow poop? (Ray-Lin Dairy)
• Simple Compost Tea (autumnrosecottage.wordpress.com)
• The recipe for a ripe batch of manure tea (sfgate.com)