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Liming culture, it must be a regional/local phenomenon.
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00rooster
Posted 11/23/2015 21:11 (#4915924)
Subject: Liming culture, it must be a regional/local phenomenon.



It seems to be far more popular in pockets of areas in some regions that others. We have access to lime here with 2 limestone mines within 125 miles and now we get lime from an ethanol plant. Yet, there is very little lime applied around me. I'm really the only person doing it that I have ever seen and even our operation has been working on it for less than 10 years. I guess my dad would have always considered it too expensive and the returns to be questionable.

I just a novice at it, but as I'm starting to take more and more soil samples every year I'm finding something very consistent. If there isn't any slope...it needs lime. Those "flat" areas are almost alway between 5.0 and 5.5, but had one farm that had never had lime in its life that was 4.6.

I'm trying to figure out why more people don't do it? Maybe I'm just surrounded by farmers who are very conservative....or maybe they just don't know? I talked to someone this spring about a farm that they had farmed and they were never impressed with the yields on what would be s prime piece of ground. I said "Maybe it just needs lime".... And I don't think it had ever crossed his mind. It just seems that lime is more of an afterthought or something that people in other areas are supposed to do.

I've seen impressive results of fixing my own ground, and was wondering if there might be a huge potential market for a lime spreading specialist around me. There is a fertilizer outfit near me that gets all the ethanol plant lime, but I just have to shake my head at how inefficiently its run. For all these years they have never had variable rate, nor any floatation tires on the spreader(mounted on truck with road tires). Now this year they got a pull type spreader too, yet.....they STILL didn't get a variable rate controller. With all the investment in the trucks & trailers to haul, payloaders, and spreaders to spread 1000's of tons of lime.....and they don't spend a few thousand more for GPS variable rate? Talk about fumbling the ball on the 1 yard line. I just don't understand......nor do I trust them to know what they are doing.

So I have to get the lime from them delivered to the field and then find someone with a floater to spread it. And that can be difficult. Everybody is busy spreading fertilizer or they don't want to hassle with it because they can't cover the acres that you can spreading fert. And then I also end up having to load the spreader with my tractor loader which isn't made to lift that much weight that high, so that isn't ideal. 95% of farmers do not have their own spreaders here, the co-op have spreaders so people just rent them. So very few spreaders around the area here that can handle lime.

So I think there could be a market for a specialized lime spreading outfit here IF you could get farmers to start thinking about it and soil testing. And since the vast majority of crop land is no-tilled you'd only I be spreading about 1 ton/year, so it could be a lot of acres/year.

I'm actually thinking about doing something for additional income, but as I said....it ain't popular here now. But it SHOULD be. Maybe buy and old mild-steel Ag Leader spreader, rebuild it, mount in on a pull-type frame for a relatively low cost lime spreader. I might not get one acre of work, or I might get too much.
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