Manure is a valuable resource for livestock farmers, but timing and managing that manure can put growers in a precarious position. Opening the window for manure application days can benefit both your schedule and the crop. In episode 7 of Precision Points, Glen Arnold picks up from the conversation I had with John Fulton, Ph. D. in episode 6, and walks us through the ins and outs of in-season manure management.
Glen, Associate Professor with The Ohio State University, has been researching manure management for years and began using a drag line to side dress manure in 2014. Over the years, he has studied the impact of sidedressing manure on an emerged crop and shared that the manure generally has enough nitrogen that this application can generally replace the in-season nitrogen application the grower would have made with synthetic nitrogen.
Allowing growers more days to get on the field with manure can be beneficial for emptying pits and benefiting the crop, but it's important that the timing is right. With a 12ft section of hose filled with water, they drug the hose over each early stage of corn. There was no yield or stand loss until they got to V5, at that point they lost about 40bu. After running these tests for 5 years, they decided that V4 was as late as you would want to make this in-season application of manure.
When it comes to equipment, there aren’t many requirements which makes this really accessible. Generally the growers set up a contract with a commercial applicator as they usually do, then the university will supply the applicator and oftentimes the tractor to pull the toolbar. One of the three toolbars the university has does not have a tractor connected, which allows the tractors to use their own equipment, meaning they can use autosteer, etc., that they might have connected.
Much of the research has been completed on corn, both incorporated and splattered on top of the corn. Glen has also splattered and incorporated manure on wheat with much success. They are also experimenting with manure on soybeans. Often the manure is used on double crop soybeans as a way for them to get moisture which helps the plants get up out of the ground. They have a couple years of research showing that the hose shows little yield impact up to V5. After establishing this, they plan to look more closely at how the soybean plants tolerate the application in-season.
“We have been doing these manure applications for a number of years, but even we have questions,” Glen stated in reference to on-the-go manure sensors. “We would like to know the consistency of the product. What is the consistency of the manure from the time you start to pump a building until you finish? So, you stop because if the nutrient concentration is going to change, and we can predict that, perhaps if we do a lot of sampling, then we'll know whether we should change our rate at some point as we make our application.”
In order to get growers more familiar with the technology, Glen often travels with this equipment to help growers get started. Currently, the university owns three 12-row manure sidedress toolbars that have been used by
farmers and commercial manure applicators to subsurface apply swine and dairy manure. These are available to interested growers, Glen believes it really helps to see how it works on your farm first.
To learn more, you can check out the “Ohio State Extension Environmental and Manure Management” page on facebook, or email arnold.2@osu.edu directly to reach out to Glen about opportunities to experiment with manure management in-season.
Have you side dressed with manure? Leave a review of your technology here.
Transcription:
Host: Morgan Seger, Host of Precision Points
Guest: Glen Arnold, Associate Professor with The Ohio State University
Morgan Seger (00:22):
Welcome back to Precision Point an ag tech podcast from Precision Ag Reviews. I'm your host, Morgan Seger and in every episode we strive to bring you unbiased, precision ag information and ideas. Today, we are spending some time with Glen Arnold to talk through using manure as a side dress application. Now, in our last episode, we talked with John Folton about using on the go manure sensors, but today we really dive deep into the benefits of this type of application. And also all of the things that you need to be thinking about as you're making this application in your growing crop. This is relatively new technology for me. And so I asked him a ton of questions and he answered them all and also left us with some really good resources. Here's my interview with Glen Arnold.
Morgan Seger (01:06):
Glen, thanks for joining me today on Precision Points. In our last episode, I was with John Fulton and he actually referenced you and your work several times. So I am so excited that you've agreed to join me today so we can get the rest of the story. Would you mind starting by just telling us a little bit about what you've been working on?
Glen Arnold (01:25):
Yes. We take the manure directly from the lagoon or the pit that it's stored in and we inject it into standing corn. In that one background picture I had, I'll pull that back up. We just injected directly into the standing corn, and then the manure in most instances has enough nitrogen that it can completely replace the purchased fertilizer the farmer would have applied to that field. So this field would be a perfect example. The corn is up about we can go to V4 and you don't see it, but there's an orange hose that's on the right hand side. And that's how most manure is handled in larger livestock facility. So there's just an eight or a 10 inch hose that goes from the pit out to the field. We go down to about a six inch hose or a five and a half inch diameter hose.
Glen Arnold (02:19):
And then we're moving manure at about, oh, 1500 to 2,000 gallons a minute. So when you think of the manure tankers farmers use, they are, oh, 7,000, 6,000 to 7,000 gallon tankers are common. So three turns in an hour would be pretty common with the field not very far away. So that's about 20,000 gallons an hour. Well, we're doing 2000 gallons a minute, so that's 120,000 gallons an hour, so it's just more efficient. There's less wear and tear on the roads. If we incorporate it like we do with our equipment, we don't have much issue with smell and things like that. And then this year I bought a drone. So I have a whole bunch of drone video I've shot on our manure incorporation methods that we're using. And then last night I got into a long discussion on Manure Kings, which is one of the Facebook pages that I put my data out on. And I was showing them the videos of what we do and stuff. So it was quite a time.
Morgan Seger (03:26):
That's really interesting. John actually mentioned that you can go over corn up until V4. And you said that you had done some research to test that. How did you do that to make sure that this was going to be like a practical way of getting manure out there in season?
Glen Arnold (03:41):
Sure. Well, what we did is we took a, we had commercial manure applicator donate about a 12 foot section of hose, six inch diameter hose, that stuff when they buy it news about 25 bucks a foot now, but used hose is something they just keep back just in case they ever needed an emergency. So he donated that to us and he put hooks on each end so that we could fill that thing with water or manure. And we could drag that over corn. So we did a five year study where we dragged corn at V1 stage, which is approximately probably two inches tall, V3, V4, V5. That's as far as we went. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And there was no yield loss or stand loss, statistically speaking, when you run the statistics on it, until we reached the V five stage. And at that point we lost about 40 bushel per acre.
Glen Arnold (04:43):
So we did that each year, five years, and the numbers were pretty consistent all five years. So I get calls from many, many states, commercial manure applicators heading out to a field, going to apply manure and they'll ring me up and say, what stage was this again? Or they'll send me a text picture of a stalk of corn and say, "What stage is this? Is this V3 corn, like you want?" And then I can look at that and say, "Yep, you're right where you want to be," or "No, you're probably not."
Glen Arnold (05:13):
So it's kind of interesting. It's just a little niche, just like you've got something perhaps you're really good at gardening or perhaps you're really good at something you like to do. For me, this manure things has evolved into that type of a niche that seems to be a good fit for the industry, for the livestock industry, for the commercial manure hauling industry. And we've still got lots we want learn. We do a lot of fields. If we just looked at the past week or 10 days, we did manure side dress fields in Darke, Shelby, Auglaize, Hancock, Paulding, Defiance, Henry. And then we've got one in William set up for later this week. And one in Fulton set up for later this week. So have manure equipment, will travel is kind of our name.
Morgan Seger (06:14):
Gotcha. So you are actually helping the growers use the equipment, so they don't have to make as big of an investment in it themselves.
Glen Arnold (06:21):
Right.
Morgan Seger (06:21):
Is that just for research purposes or is that just to get the technology out there?
Glen Arnold (06:28):
Both. A lot of it is to get the technology out there. We've done enough small plot research that we know how corn is going to respond. The yield is every bit as good as commercial fertilizer, perhaps just a little bit better in most instances. So there's no, there's no drop off in yield in what we do. And I think that when I was a pretty young county extension educator for Ohio State, I recall a saw and water offices used to have no till drills. And essentially if a farmer wanted to borrow the no till drill to try it out, plant some soybeans or wheat or whatever they wanted to try, they could sign up, borrow the equipment from the saw and water office and try it out. And then if they liked it the next time they went out to make a purchase of a drill or planter of some sort, they could feel comfortable that, "That worked pretty well in my field. I'm willing to ..."
Glen Arnold (07:25):
And again, they upgrade every five to seven years oftentimes on their planting equipment. So it was easy for them to make that transition. With our manure application equipment, it really helps when farmers can see this perform in their fields or know that their neighbors did it and they get drive by those fields every day and look at it and see how things grow. And when they get together at Christmas time and talk about it, oftentimes a lot of in-laws will get together and they'll say, well, how did that do? And then they can kind of go in and say, well, this is what we found out. It performed quite well. So we've had very favorable weather this spring to get these side dress plots have done much, much better than we did last year. So we feel really good about where we are and how many acres we've gotten covered this year.
Morgan Seger (08:17):
Good. Do you see that starting to wind down now? I know a lot of the corn around us is probably getting past that stage. Are you guys about wrapped for this season?
Glen Arnold (08:26):
We are close to it, but we did have a lot of replanting done. Some areas of Northwest Ohio would have caught five or six inches of rain and that some of those heavy downpours I had where I live in Glandorf in about two days, we had about three inches, but others got more than that. And depending on where the stage of the corn, when it was in the ground, more farmers, several in Van Wert, Fulton, Williams. Many of them had to do some replanting this year. And I should say most areas had some replanting. So we may catch a few more fields that we hadn't planned on originally. But yeah, we're getting close to wrapping it up due to the height of the corn.
Morgan Seger (09:13):
Gotcha. So is there any specific in-cab technology that they need to be able to do this?
Glen Arnold (09:19):
Not really. When we do the work with the farmers, the farmer or the lifestyle producer contracts with his commercial manure applicator, like he typically would to have the manure pumped because a commercial manure applicator provides the pumper, or I should say the pump to move the manure, then he provides the hose. And then he brings the knowledge of how the layout, the hose, make sure that things go smoothly. All commercial applicators or all commercial manure applicators have had challenges with our own wrapping of hoses and kinking of hoses and making Tootsie rolls out of manure hoses. And so they know better than to, to get into those situations. So the livestock producers still contract with commercial applicators to have the manure pumped. What the university is providing through grants is we're providing the equipment to do the application with. And oftentimes we provide the tractor to pull the equipment or to carry it down through the field.
Glen Arnold (10:19):
We do that primarily because very few people have equipment that's set up to incorporate manure into emerged corn. It's just not very commonly done. Most manure is applied in the fall when there are no growing crops or it's done on wheat stubble when, again, there's no growing crop. So many of the commercial applicators don't have tractors that are set up to travel down rows of corn. They don't have equipment that's set up to inject manure every 30 inches. So these are some things that it's just not very common yet in the industry. So by us providing the toolbar and attractor, we can alleviate those issues. And then we have one of our three toolbars that university has.
Glen Arnold (11:03):
One of the three we do not have a tractor on this year. So in those instances, the farmers have gotten their own tractor out and they've hooked up to the equipment and they can then make them in their application themselves, again, using their commercial applicators hoses and stuff. But that allows them if they planted the field using their auto steer and our RTK, it allows them to come back and then side dress with their auditors theater RTK. So they don't have to be steering carefully all the way down through that corn field. They're able to punch the button, everything works good and they're happy campers.
Morgan Seger (11:43):
Yep. That, that makes a lot of sense. I could see a lot of people wanting to go that way so they can still check Twitter and do the other essential business while they're in the cab.
Glen Arnold (11:54):
The auto steer that was developed a number of years ago has really alleviated a lot of the stress on farmers. When you talk to older farmers at that time, at the end of the day, they'd just be completely wore out. They had a long, long day of planting or a long, long day of doing something side dressing that required staying on a row or following a laser Mark or whatever, but to be able to not have to grip that steering wheel all the way down the field, farmers will tell you that they just feel a lot better at the end of the day than they did before. And that's, that's really nice.
Morgan Seger (12:32):
Yep. Oh, I can believe that for sure. We actually don't have auto steer on our equipment and my father-in-law said, that's how he knew my husband needed glasses.
Glen Arnold (12:43):
Oh yeah. Oh, following that row marker is not everybody's cup of tea. I mean, it really isn't.
Morgan Seger (12:52):
So, the last time or the, I'm sorry, the first time I saw I was on a farm where I saw a grower actually doing this was only a couple of years ago. How long have you been working with this and has it changed much or how is it kind of evolving?
Glen Arnold (13:07):
Well, we began using a manure tanker. As a matter of fact, we were just using that same manure tanker this week up in Fulton County. We used it on several fields up there. Farmers who've never sat down any side dressing whatsoever. Their county agent, Eric Sicker went in and did I believe he used one manure source and did five or six separate farms with that. But we started using the manure tanker, so about a five to 6,000 gallon capacity and we modified the wheels and we modified the equipment to travel down corn rows because manure or tankers traditionally have the large wide flotation tires that are about 30 inches wide. So we got, we got modified rims from referred manufacturing. They built them specially for us, we got some Firestone Pay loader tires to put on the tanker be they're very, very strong and that allowed us to do tanker plots for probably I'd say six to seven years we did those types of plots.
Glen Arnold (14:13):
And we did them from as far South as Darke County. We went over as far East, as Crawford and Seneca counties. And we went as far North as Fulton County and driving our tractor and our tanker around to do all those plots. Then in about 2014 is when we did our first dry coast plots with Herod Farms in Darke County. And we really liked that. So we worked hard to get grant money and donations together. And we have three toolbars now, three 12 row side dress toolbars that we try get around to as many farms as we can with this technology. And again, if the weather cooperates, we can really get a lot done. When it doesn't cooperate, we just aren't as successful each season.
Morgan Seger (15:04):
Sure. Sure. So have you seen this alleviate any of the stress they have for just generally getting pits empty?
Glen Arnold (15:12):
Well, what it does is when you think about it, we have two major windows of manure application in Ohio. One is the fall, the other is the summer time. And then there's a small window in the spring that we use when we're really desperate and we need to get manure moved. The other windows are also in between cuttings of hay. You'll see manure go out there. Of course, when wheat harvest occurs, you'll see manure go out there. And of course I mentioned the fall window. There's about a period of about 30 days to 35 days between when corn is planted and when it's too tall to side dress with our dry coat systems that we're using. So it creates a window of time that wasn't available before. So when you think about how much wetter our seasons have been in the last eight to 10 years, much of this extra water is causing many of the Lake Erie issues that we're running into, a wetter growing seasons means fewer application days, fewer days to get anything done.
Glen Arnold (16:20):
So I know talking to Aaron Wilson at Ohio State, our climatologist, he has mentioned that we've lost upwards of, I believe seven fall days for work. Well that's seven fewer days for mature application as well. So if we can find other windows, we can spread that workload out a little bit. When I talk to commercial manure applicators, they like this window because they've just finished spring window of time. They're actually waiting on the first cuttings of hay to come off or the wheat to be harvested. So this is actually a time period when they usually aren't nearly as busy as they will be in another two or three weeks. So they like this window. It's just a matter of whether there's enough work that can be done in this window to justify them to get equipment that's able to travel down the corn fields, the rows of the corn field.
Morgan Seger (17:22):
So I see, obviously in the picture behind you, you have corn, have you tried any crops other than corn?
Glen Arnold (17:29):
Well, we've tried in this picture, we're actually following the row and we're incorporating the manure. We also know that if we wish to, we can drive at an angle across the field with this equipment and not incorporate, just splatter the manure on top of the ground. And many livestock producers like that. They'll plant their corn and then they'll have the commercial applicator come in and splatter a manure on top of the corn, even before it comes out of the ground, knowing that as soon as that corms up out of the ground, it will begin to use the nutrients that are in that manure. Even the H2O program allows for manure to be splattered on top of growing corn and then cultivated in. So, we've got incorporated manure in the corn and we really liked that, we've got splattered manure on top of the corn, then we know that's successful.
Glen Arnold (18:26):
The other things we've done differently on this technology. Some of our farmers plant their corn at 45 degree angles, so that instead of the field being planted the most efficient manner possible, they'll actually turn all their equipment and run it a 45 degree angle to plant the field. And a reason they do that is that a commercial manure applicator, if you have a square field, the manure applicator wants to lay his hose catty corner from one corner of that square to the other. And that divides the field into two triangles. And then he'll do the manure application on one half of that field or one triangle, then he'll do a hose maneuver, they call it a crossover or bow tie, and then he'll do them in our application on the other half of the field or the other triangle.
Glen Arnold (19:19):
So some of the farmers plant their fields to accommodate the commercial manure applicator, others like straight rows of corn. So we've developed two or three techniques that we can manage the hose properly so that the commercial applicator can go about his work. But that does require a second tractor in the field, that does require a hose jumper to maneuver the hose. But still it works. So I try to get these on videos so that we can get them on our university Facebook page, so people can look at them and then make their own decisions. Whether they like that. We have also splattered manure on wheat and also incorporated manure on wheat. It works very, very well. When we incorporate manure on wheat, we usually use a toolbar called a grassland applicator or [inaudible 00:20:10] stool bar. And that would be something that instead of being on 30 inch centers, it would be down closer to seven and a half inch centers so that we get manure closer to the wheat. So wheat responds very, very well to manure. We've got a number of years of research on that. It's done well.
Glen Arnold (20:26):
We're also tinkering with manure on soybeans, partly because one of the most popular uses of manure is to apply to double crop soybeans, to provide moisture, to help those double crop soybeans emerge. So double crop soybeans would be soybeans that are planted once the wheat has been harvested and most of the straw has been bailed. Then oftentimes they'll go directly in and drill soybeans into those fields. And you're talking usually by the 5th to the 10th of July, that this is done. Oftentimes that's a drier time of the year. And if you can then put a dairy manure, especially at higher volumes, like 10,000 gallons per acre, that can help provide some of the moisture to allow the soybeans to come up. So we're tinkering with manure on soybeans, not only to germinate them, but also how tolerant are they once the soybeans have been emerged, how tolerant are they of the hose that goes across them and how tolerant would they be of the manure that's applied.
Glen Arnold (21:30):
We've got a couple of years of data now on the hose and it doesn't seem like the soybeans care too much about the manure hose dragging across them at V1, V3, and V5 stage of growth. V7 it does, it bends them over and we don't think that's going to be a longterm solution. So we feel good about the hose. Now it's a matter of adding manure to the mixture.
Morgan Seger (21:52):
Gotcha. So have you seen any differences in nodulation or anything like that?
Glen Arnold (21:57):
Haven't really got there yet, because again, we're just working with the hose so far, but eventually when we do add manure to the mix, which is nitrogen, of course, then we'll have to give some flock to the ... Yield is usually the end game for most of us. We want to see economically how this is going to work. So it's going to take a few years of small plot work and our higher soybean council is helping with that.
Morgan Seger (22:23):
Gotcha. Now this might be a stupid question, but does it matter what type of manure you're using?
Glen Arnold (22:29):
Well, it actually does. The manure that's the most commonly used for our side dress work is swine finishing manure. And that's manure that comes from buildings that have finishing pigs, and those pigs that go from 10 pounds up to about 300 pounds. That's a really good source of a lot of nitrogen in that manure, more than what would be in typical nursery manure and more that would typically be in sow manure. Beef manure is even richer than swine finishing manure. So for farmers who have cattle on slats, that's a really good source for this. The one that's probably a little weaker in nitrogen is the dairy manure, still a lot of great nutrients you have in a micronutrient package that goes with manure or of course, but dairy manure would be lower nitrogen. So generally because it's lower in all nutrients, NPNK will usually to go at higher rates of application with the dairy manure. So in Paulding County, we did a field this year, that side dressed with dairy manure, we've done that in Fulton County, we've done it in a few other counties, and they've had pretty good results with it. It's again, it's a product that you're going to have to move at some point in a year. Perhaps if we put that on and replace commercial fertilizer, it can help pay for the costs of them in our application.
Morgan Seger (23:51):
Okay. So then when I was talking with John, he mentioned the, on the go manure sensors. So is that kind of a partnership where you're helping them get the manure out and those sensors are what's creating that application map?
Glen Arnold (24:10):
That's part of it. Yeah. It's we have been doing these manure applications for a number of years, but even we have questions. We would like to know what the consistency of the product. What is the consistency of the manure from the time you start to pump a building until you finish, so you stop. Because if the nutrient concentration is going to change, and we can predict that perhaps if we do a lot of sampling, then we'll know whether we should change our rate at some point, as we make our application, John has a graduate student. Chris is working at this, they have a John Deere, 3000 sensor that we have put on one of our manure side dress toolbars. And Chris has been gathering samples of manure from the side of the toolbar, as the sensor has been sensing the nutrient content of the manure that travels through the toolbar.
Glen Arnold (25:06):
So we're hoping that the results of the samples that we get back from Brookside confirm the accuracy of the sensor. And if it does, over not only this season, but probably next season, if we get that confirmation, then that would give us a lot of confidence that that sensor could be used for that purpose. And then also once we've looked at the data and evaluated the outcome, perhaps we can do a better job with our rating of our manure. We can put perhaps what want to put higher rates on at the start of the pit and lower rates on toward the end of the pit. If the concentration gets greater. We're just not sure, but it's like anything else. It's perhaps a next step. You know, you want to get more accurate, more precise, John Fulton and his work with Precision Agriculture is pretty strong. And so I'm pretty tickled to be able to work with him and his grad student on this.
Morgan Seger (26:05):
No, that's great. With that toolbar, is there a range that it can handle as you talked about, like increasing or decreasing the rates based off of the makeup of the manure?
Glen Arnold (26:18):
These tool bars are designed to handle quite a wide range of, of rates of manure application. We've gone as low as 5,000 gallons per acre, and as high as 13,000 gallons per acre with these toolbars. And it's just a matter of what the commercial applicator's capable of pushing through his system, because commercial applicators always want to maximize the efficiency of their equipment. If they can pump 2,000 gallons a minute instead of 1500 gallons a minute, then they'll want to run, and they'll want to pump 2,000 gallons a minute. So if they want to do that, then we need to adjust our tractor speed.
Glen Arnold (27:00):
And everyone has charts and mathematical formulas that we can use. And if we know the flow rates going through the toolbar and the width of our toolbar, of course being 12 rows is 30 feet, then we know what ground speed attractor wants to aim for to get the rate per acre on it we want to have. So it all fits together and every field's a little bit different depending on the thickness of the manure, depending on the commercial applicator during the pumping, depending on the distance from the field to the manure source, because as commercial applicators have grown their capacity over the years, they can go out to distances two, three, four miles from the manure source. And when you look at all the acreage that could be covered in a radius going out three miles from a site, that's a lot of acreage. That gives them the ability to put manure on the ground that probably didn't receive much manure years ago when it was all tanked by a tractor.
Morgan Seger (28:04):
Wow, this is really interesting. And I appreciate you taking the time to kind of break it down for us. It definitely sounds like there's a lot of things you need to think through as every situation is a little bit different, but if someone wanted to learn more or watch those videos you mentioned, where would you recommend they go?
Glen Arnold (28:21):
Well, the university has a Facebook page called Ohio State Extension Environmental and Manure Management. And I post a lot of my data and a lot of my videos and a lot of the results on that page. I think it's just a, it's a way that we've gotten a lot of people from Canada, from New York, from North Carolina, from Iowa, Nebraska. We have a lot of people who send us questions or access that page. We're up to about 2300 followers, I believe. So it's something that's grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years, as we've been able to get more videos and more information out. So that's one way. Another way would be to look me up at Ohio State. It's just Glen Arnold or Arnold.2@osu.edu. I'd be happy to swap some emails with them. I can put videos in a Dropbox at Ohio State pretty easily for farmers. And most of the farmers that we've worked with this year, we've created Dropboxes and we've put pictures and videos of this activity in there. And that way they can show their own relatives what they were doing. You know, when it comes Christmas time and someone's over to visit, they can pull these right out of the Dropbox at Ohio State and look at these.
Morgan Seger (29:42):
That's awesome. Thank you so much. Well, that wraps another episode of Precision Points. Thank you for tuning in as always our show notes will be available at precisionagreviews.com. Head there for the links that Glen mentioned, and also check out our network of farmer reviews. Make sure you rate, review, and subscribe to our podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Thanks for tuning in.
Host: Morgan Seger
Morgan Seger spent ten years working with ag retail, specifically in ag tech. She lives and farms in western Ohio, where she has four children with her husband Ben. Morgan, has her own blog called Heart and Soil where she talks about her experience farming, gardening, and raising her family.
Guest: Glen Arnold
Glen Arnold is an Associate Professor with The Ohio State University and serves as an Extension Field Specialists in the area of Manure Nutrient Management Application since 2012. He was the county extension agent in Putnam County, Ohio from 1989 to 2012. While in Putnam county he began research trials on using liquid manure to top-dress wheat.
After several years of success with wheat, he began to work with local farmers on sidedressing corn with livestock manure using a manure tanker with wheels modified to travel in corn fields. In 2014 Glen started using a drag line to sidedress emerged corn and has worked with farmers and commercial manure applicators in the western Lake Erie basin to adapt this practice. Today, the university owns three 12-row manure sidedress toolbars that have been used by farmers and commercial manure applicators to subsurface apply swine and dairy manure in more than a dozen Ohio counties. His research goal is to move livestock producers toward applying manure during the crop growing season instead of the late fall application window. This will help reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen entering Lake Erie.
