[AT] Manure spreaders

Chuck Bealke bealke at airmail.net
Wed Mar 30 16:24:51 PDT 2016


> On Mar 30, 2016, at 11:01 AM, Len Rugen <rugenl at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> One of my manure stories.....  As a kid, I had to clean out the chicken house.  It has a broken up concrete floor, mostly gone, but too many chunks left to use on the garden or fields, so we just dumped it in a low spot at the field edge.  This year, it was a road edge.  It was mostly dry, lots of corn cobs, but Mom must have thrown the guts of some cushaw squash out for the chickens.  A vine sprouted in the dumped manure, climbed about 20' up a tree, it was HUGE.  But when it turned a little dry, it died, must have been too much N in the pile :-) 

Len,

Right you are. That stuff will almost sprout hair on a billiard ball.  Can handle digging the packed stuff out of a barn from cattle standing for a while or a day or two moving the horsey flavor, but the POTENT ammonia from moving the chicken stuff out and onto a wagon had me weaving all the time to find fresh air to breath.  Don’t advise doing it on a day without much wind.

On a different note from same thread, thank you Spencer for the four minutes worth of concentrated spreading notes.  During my teens, bought a typical steel-wheeled, weathered plank bed, moving chain manure spreader that had followed horses or mules for years. Worked great behind a tractor, but had no place to put it under roof and was not blessed with too much cash for restoring it. After using it each Spring, painted used motor oil all over the bed and chain. The dried out bed soaked it up, and the spreader worked fine for the several years I used it.

Chuck Bealke
Dallas





More information about the AT mailing list