When I lived in PA I was hounded all the time by companies with the legal right to compete against PECO, Philadelphia Electric. Basically the deal seemed to be about a ten percent cheaper rate in the first year, then seemed to go back where it was. Wasn't enough for us to switch to a no name. You had to call PECO anyway if anything broke...
Farmer, I'm worried about using stronger fertilizers, maybe for no reason in this sandy soil.
Many years spent boating in the Chesapeake taught me the perils of too much farm fertilizer washing down into the Bay and causing all kinds of excessive nitrogen problems, fish kills, and algae blooms. Huge effort was made to control that in all contiguous states and it seemed to work, Bay is much cleaner now. So I worry about yeah it might be easy to double down on my fertilizer to get better results, but....the ditch on the edge of this field where all water drains is the very beginning of what they call locally the Blue Line system of water drainage ditches, all of which wind up sooner or later down in the Pamlico River. They are inspected and maintained. Probably only a big issue if there's a gully washer, but I can see in local fields where clearly a lot of water had flowed. So anything on top is headed down to the River.
Any application techniques that can minimize this? First I'm going to disc the granular in and then I'm going to drag rake it. So it should be pretty thoroughly mixed in. But then after the hills are made, the gulleys are natural water drains and anything in those drains, well, drains...
I had planned for the rows to go parallel with the tree line, so they are aiming right at the main ditch. Perhaps I should furrow in the opposite direction. In this veggie garden I can. Out in the main field everything is aimed at the ditch anyway. I don't think my farmer neighbors lay awake at night worrying about their fertilizer runoff. Versus Farmer who has 86 different regulations to comply with and probably isn't even close to water.
My hats off to anyone who has to scoop poop out of a chicken house, I don't care how high tech the equipment is, and those looked pretty cool.
It would take me a long time to get used to that. Very happy and appreciative others do it. All I see is the finished product on that plastic tray.
I watch a lot of farming videos and watch application of huge waste flingers and sprayers, pig stuff looks particularly nasty.
That stuff smells so bad I can smell it coming through the computer!
The ironic part is a couple trailer loads of that foul smelling stuff is just what my gardens need I bet.
Instead, I bought ten more bags of cow manure and I'm going to go dump them now out in the field.
Then I just might screw around a little and disc it all in. Too early otherwise, but it gives the local farmers something to chuckle
about when they drive by seeing me out there thinking
what is that fool doing now? Or they may think it's my infamous neighbor until they see the shiny
paint on my tractors...then they know it's not him. And that makes them doubly curious. I watch the trucks slow way down for a look see.
