Being able spread manure without driving manure trucks to and from the farm….this is now possible through drag hosing! This spring we hired Eric Severy to do some drag hosing from the main manure pit at Fairmont Farm as well as our new satellite manure pit at “The Haven”. We do recognize the impact we have on our community and our neighbors and are excited to share that by keeping our trucks off the roads by drag hosing 225 acres, we were able to reduce that impact!
Drag Hosing on Vincent Flats Road in East Montpelier. This picture is taken between half a mile and a mile from the Farm.
This system takes quite a bit of setup which involves A LOT of hose, use of town culverts and owned and rented land to spread the hose on.
Pit Crawler at work in the Fairmont Farm manure pit. This crawler stirs up the manure and sand (from our bedding) to make a consistent and spreadable product.
This is where the drag hosing begins! From here a pump works to move manure from the pit through the hose and all the way to the fields.
Manure Pump. From here the hose followed the back of the barns…
Went through the pasture…
Under a culvert….through another pasture…
Down the road….
Through another culvert….
Across a field (which happens to have a great cover crop on it!)….
Through another field….
and finally…to the tractor spreading on Vincent Flats!
This was a really fun experiment for us this spring, something that we are excited to give another try either in the fall or next spring. We were able to move manure much quicker with this technique and there was less wear on our equipment and the roads!
While we would love to use this technique on all of our fields, we have a large number of fields that are a distance away and the logistics would not work out. For those fields you will see our equipment out on the roads, you can check out this post from last spring on road safety.