Agri Business Rep Says Dairymen Not To Blame For Bay Pollution
“It’s time somebody stood up for
our dairy and livestock
producers,” says Bob Martin of A.
B. C. Groff Farm Equipment at
New Holland. Farmers have been
taking a bum rap. En
vironmentalists want to blame
them for the pollution in
Chesapeake Bay.
The accusation doesn’t stand up
when you look at the facts, Martin
emphasizes, except for those
farmers who aren’t controlling soil
erosion. When soil erodes into the
streams and rivers, it takes plant
food with it and does cause
pollution, but it isn’t necessary. It
is not fair to blame the good far
mers who are keeping their soil at
home.
Dairymen, especially, get good
marks from Martin because they
have a lot of land in hay crops.
That is the best protection against
erosion, says Martin. Silage and
gram producers who use no-till
planting are doing their share to
protect the bay too. No-till planting
with some trash left on top of the
ground between the rows slows, or
eliminates, run off.
Some experts want to claim we
are producing too much manure
and that this is the problem for the
bay. Again, the claim doesn’t hold
up if you stop to think about it, says
Martin. Of course there is a
problem if the soil erodes.
It’s only the big confinement
poultry and hog operations that
have more manure than they use
for crops, and these systems aren’t
really comparable to dairy farms.
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Dairymen are recycling the
plant food in the manure to grow
the next year’s crops. Almost all
have more acres than they need to
use the manure without a nutrient
buildup. The majority could add a
lot of cows before they reach the
limits.
If we grow com for silage and
plant barley, rye or wheat in that
land after silage harvest we can
take off a cereal silage crop in the
spring by the time it’s time to plant
com again. If we do that we can
take off eight to twelve tons ol
wheat silage in addition to the 25
tons of plant food. Three hundred
pounds of nitrogen, 100 pounds ol
phosphate and 250 pounds ol
potassium is about the amount you
can expect to remove per acre in
the silage.
That is more plant food than you
could expect to haul out to the field
from a large, high producing cow
in a year’s time, Martin points out.
This simply means we could in
crease dairy stocking rates to a
cow per acre before we start to
crowd the limit; and that isn’t
counting the hay land.
The environmentalists want to
subtract our hay land when they
talk about the acres available for
spreading manure. This is an
illusion too! They get away with it
until you think about it. We usually
don’t like to spread manure on
alfalfa during the life of the stand,
but we know we can put on a lot of
manure in the year before seeding*
alfalfa. That way we put the plant
food “in the bank” for later use
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jb Martin, Grc "s Farm Equipment at New Holland says ii > time somebody stood up
for dairy and livestock producers who are being blamed for pollution they aren't causing.
He says dairymen can increase cow numbers before they approach the safe limits of land
for manure disposal.
while the alfalfa is producing. That
puts the alfalfa acres back into the
picture for land available for
spreading. When you do that you
see we don’t have too many cows at
all.
We would have plenty of land for
the poultry and hog manure too if
we had the acres used to grow the
grain consumed in the confinement
systems. There is a problem where
Lancaatar ranging Saturday, January 31; IM7-07 * -
the grain is bought in and the land
isn’t available for manure
spreading.
However, it already appears we
can solve this one too. Composting
poultry and hog waste “tames the
bear.” You don’t need all the com
cobs that come with the shelled
com to mix with the manure to get
good compost, and compost is a
cash commodity now-a-days, notes
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Martin. People are glad to buy it
for lawns, flower gardens and
indoor plants.
Take it all together, we shouldn't
be scolding our farmers for the
problems in the Chesapeake Bay,
except for those who aren’t con
trolling erosion, says Martin. The
real problem is the pollution from
the towns and industry, but nobody
wants to say much about that. It’s
easier to go after farmers.
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