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| Yes, you have a good understanding of what my idea is. On the drive to the in-law today I was thinking of a way to get the N into the pile. If I use an old hay stacker(if you aren't familier with them they make stacks of hay that look like loaves of bread), and I could mist a stream of 32% where the leaves blow in, that would get decent coverage. I could kick the stacks out in a line and it would be ready to turn. But there are few things that I want to make sure I'm figuring right. For instance, corn stover has a 60:1 C:N ratio, so does that mean that I'd need 1lb of Nitrogen for every 60lbs of stover to get breakdown? So then 1 ton(2000lbs) of stover would be
2000/60=33.3lbs N
33.3lbs N= 9.5 gallons of 32%
So for every 1 ton of stover I'd apply 9.5 gallons of 32%.
Am I calculating this C:N ratio right?
How often would I expect to turn the pile? Every couple days, weeks, months? It would be over winter here, so temp would be rather cold. The management of the pile might be the biggest obstacle to overcome, and I don't know how labor intensive it would be. I'd also like to have an understanding of what kind of time it would take, would it be ready by spring, or would it take a whole year? I'm not going to have a fancy "pile turner", but just a loader tractor as a way to mix and turn the pile over.
That is why I want to start experimenting with this. I think it would be awesome to have 100 tons of compost to spread on each field every fall, and I could really build up some of our eroded soils.
Right now a lot of folks around here roll up their stover into round bales and sell them to cattle feedlots. But that doesn't guarantee you will get any of the manure to haul back out, and even if you do you'll get someone else's weed problem. And last time I checked they barely got enough money for the stover bales to pay for the extra fertilizer that they'd need to replace lost nutrients. | |
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I need guidnace on turning corn stover into compost
