FarmYard Manures - worth it ?

As a point of interest. The Isle of Man government had an incinerator built on a retired landfill site, on a hill, just outside it's capital Douglas and became operational in 2004. The decision was made because the island being small, had almost run out of landfill space and shipping it elsewhere wasn't really an option.



Having found a way of coping with the islands waste another problem arose. I see no mention of this in the discussion and links in the previous posts - how to dispose of the fly ash incinerators produce. Ironically that is disposed of by landfill, a site on the island in the middle of a tree plantation, that was dug specifically for the disposal of the ash.

 

The waste to energy incinerators actually generates a lot of ash, I think it's about 10% in volume of what was burnt. Not sure how much of that ash is fly ash, if any. If it was all fly ash, then a high proportion of that would of went to the construction industry. I thought fly ash mainly came from the fumes when burning coal.

 

We also need to tackle those higher up the chain as well though. Supermarkets for looking at volume sales. After years of pressure from the NFU supermarkets are actually selling wonky veg instead of rejecting it. They sell live plants and then adopt a no watering policy, they just see plants as disposables.

We used to grow bedding plants for Woolworths, we were contracted to supply every store in Cumbria and Lancashire. We had a good working relationship until we were introduced to the new area manager. He wanted to increase each stores order by 100%, no store in 5 years had increased their sales by that much, so it was highly unlikely they would shift a 100% increase. We were then told they were going to be operating on a no watering and sale or return policy. When we said we would have to increase our prices to take into account there would be waste, we were told no, take it or leave it. We walked away, we would have been the ones taking the financial risk not them, they don't care.

 

Indeed, supermarkets and manufacturers of packaging can do a whole lot more to help recycle. Goods that are on the supermarket shelves have to look "sexy" to sell, you alluded to the fruit and veg situation where mishaped, ugly looking specimens are rejected.

To the inexperienced eyes of the man on the street supermarket packaging is just paper, cardboard, or plastic. All easy to recycle, yes? Wrong. To keep products fresher a lot of plastics, films in particular, are co extruded and multi layered with other polymer types, to keep products fresher, making them impossible to recycle.

Polythene film is the biggest culprit. Polythene can be, and often is, multi layered with PET or Nylon or PP. Once this process happens it is then currently unrecyclable.

Also, for example, look at how shiny looking dog/cat food biscuit bags are. I've also noticed this on some breakfast cereal boxes too. This is because the manufacturers of the paper and cardboard often layer the outside with plastic film. It helps stop the packaging from ripping, getting moisture damaged and also keeps the product fresher. Great, but then that packaging product is unrecyclable, whereas plain paper or cardboard is easily recycled.

There are many many examples such as these. My missus hates me going shopping with her because I'm always moaning about the packaging that many basic household essentials are wrapped in, lol.

This huge packaging manufacturing problem coupled with joe publics shrug their shoulders attitude towards segregation has recycling centres such as ours aghast with frustration.

Incineration is so much easier, but in this day and age, so wrong too!

 

That also raises the question about using "cardboard" in our compost heaps.
At the moment we only put 'raw' cardboard like toilet or kitchen roll inserts that soak up water instantly, other 'cardboard' boxes like say crispbreads the water just runs off.
Assume like you said thats becuase of the various plastic coatings and so no idea how bad that would be for the compost and subsequently the soil it goes onto ?

 

I only put cardboard, as in normal box cardboard, on my heap,I'd not use cereal boxes etc. As they always feel waxy.
Likewise any boxes with masses of tape on them, I leave that to the recycling.

 

I'm glad some of you have actually noticed this "odd" cardboard phenomenon, now you know why!

The actual plastic that the cardboard is coated with is harmless enough, in as much that it won't harm your compost. But it may harm wildlife that comes looking for morsels of food if they ingest it.

If it goes in your composter the cardboard part will be composted but obviously the plastic filmy bit will not. You will forever be picking bits of plastic out of your well rotted down compost!

If anything from paper and cardboard is going to contaminate your compost it will more than likely be the chemicals from any print that's on them. To be honest I don't know what's in these inks, or whether they are bad for certain plants.

To be on the safe side ALL paper and cardboard in our house goes in the recycling bin, none goes in my composter at all, irrespective of whether it's "pure" or whether it has a filmy coating on it or not.

All it needs is government legislation bringing in stopping packaging manufacturers from coating paper/cardboard packaging with yet more plastics and this would help enormously.

Will it happen? I doubt it.

 

The greatest problem is that the emphasis upon animal production is not where the greatest areas of arable crops and vegetables are grown.Many farmers have 'straw for muck' deals with neighbours.
Transport of large quantities across from say ,Devon to East Anglia would cost beyond value, not to mention consideration of en-route rural smells. Problems of river pollution arise out of attempts to dispose of manures adjacent to production, at rates of application driven by produced volume not agronomical needs. Add in typical rainfall to intensive units in ,say, West Wales, and there in a problem.

 

So would you say it's not worth moving the stuff across country to put it on fields but it is ok to move it to incinerators to burn, and I wonder how many miles the average sack of fertiliser travels.

I realise this stuff might have varying amounts of NPK but they do state the NPK on a bucket of chicken pellets that you can buy at most garden centres, so it's not impossible to analyse the stuff.

I do occasionally pass fields with massive manure heaps, presumably ready to be spread at some point, and they used to use some by product, I think from the paper making industry, but that used to stink for miles around.

 

Lots of miles I've hauled it all over the uk

Bristol>Scotland
Hull > Kent
Hull > Newbury
Great Yarmouth> Bridgewater
Bridgewater > Newbury
Bridgewater > Kent
Bridgewater > Oxford
Southhamtom> Chester
Billingham > Oxford
Chester > Sharpness
Edit i for got this one
Bridgewater > Wales ie into the mountains to fert the trees in a few forsets and the ferting was done by heilcopter
Just few and i could go on

Then you have the ingredients shipped in for Spain, Africa etc most fert makers are on the docks so ship to shed but some are hauled to fert makers/bagers all over the country

 

Ammonium nitrate 100kg/ha 38% nitrogen c£850/ tonne
FYM 30000 kg/ha 1.8% £££?

 

I was watch country file a while back and they were looking at soil under a microscope.
I'm not organic, but I'm not totally inorganic.

But they were showing how dead the soil was in fields that only get chemical fertilisers in comparison to ones that are organic.

I still think even if you use chemical fertilisers there must be some advantage of adding organic matter each year, if only to hold onto the chemicals and water.

 

On recycling Vs incinerating, I actually don't get the opposition to incineration. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

Recycling is a farce. Only a small percentage of what you put into recycling actually gets recycled, and it uses a lot of energy and water to do so. Most of our recycling gets loaded onto ships and sent to the other side of the planet, where it is just dumped. Absolutely skint people pick through it and collect what they can sell, but most of it just sits there, gets burned on open fires, or ends up in the sea.

With modern incinerators, you can turn waste into energy. Sure there'll be something left for landfill, but nowhere near as much as so called recycling generates.

I think most people's hatred of incinerators comes from older, inefficient incinerators that produced a lot of smoke and didn't burn things properly. That coupled with greenwashing by government and councils to have us believe that our empty plastic milk bottle will magically turn into a new one.

 

Glass bottle recycling seems strange to me, we melt them down and make, .......bottles, or grind them up and make aggregate.

I'm prepared to take my glass to bottle banks, but I only know of one around here now, most have gone and they say put your glass in with your recycling.
It gets smashed as they put it into the back of the lorry, you can hear it all breaking, so then presumably it has to be separated, its just stupid.