Herbicide contamination in manure has become a huge problem.
It’s part of the reason I bought my own cows. You can learn more in my latest video:
We have gotten some good comments since:
Katie in Wisconsin writes:
“Thank you for bringing awareness to this issue David. My garden was destroyed by Grazon tainted manure in 2017… it still wasn’t easy figuring out the cause at that time. Huge learning experience. It is NOT worth taking a chance on manure from a source you’re not super familiar with.” Â
Gary writes:
“Thank you for your warnings on YT and here David. We were going to go pick up a truck load of cow manure from local farmers this springs to help build this years compost production, now we wont go that route and we will be getting your book. Thank you for being a watchman on the wall.”
Laura L. lost her garden:
“I started my first garden 5 years ago . I’ve had a green thumb all my life , but this was my first 1000sq ft. Veggie garden. We live on a farm and our neighbors have cows. I asked if I could collect the manure for the garden. I spread it EVERYWHERE. I’m telling you I tried my best to “fix it” , but total loss.”
FreeAmerican2020 writes:
“David – we have had cows most of my life. We used grazon, spayed for everything. We stopped about four years ago. Two years ago, we started to grow a garden and the dirt was dead, no worms – nothing. Our dirt is just now recovering.”
Mary Loomis writes:
“Thank you David for the important info. I remember a few years back my neighbor and I were talking garden and he mentioned Aminopyralids which I had never heard of. That was the year all the people we knew who gardened lost their tomato crops. Makes me think.”
Louise Jacobs writes:
“Happened to us about seven years ago, I was ready to sell everything and move. I will not buy steer manure from the stores, and I don’t even trust potting soil anymore. That Grazon is everywhere. We got it from composted horse manure at the local community fair grounds.”
carlprice64 writes:
“I had a awesome strawberry bed. Produced tons. I bought some hay from the feed store for my laying nest, and threw some into the pet rabbits pen. I didn’t think anything about it. Mind you I was aware of AMINOPYRALIDS. Well I decided to scoop up some rabbit manure and tossed it on my strawberries, the strawberries stunted and produced dried fruit basically. It hit me when I saw what had happened to my strawberries. The rabbit ate the hay and now I got AMINOPYRALIDS in my bed. I’m now trying an experiment. I tossed a ton of mustard seed in to see if I might salvage my strawberries. Both are growing together and the strawberries are blooming. Still got to wait and see if that purified the soil. Some of the mustard looks yellowish at this time…”
lou e writes:
“Had a friend who loved to do straw bale gardening , until one year everything died. He had gotten the bales from the same friend but didn’t know he had started spraying his fields.”
(And that is why Straw Bale Gardening is often NOT a good method, Joel Karsten’s whining notwithstanding…)
There are a lot of stories of wrecked gardens out there. Watch yourselves, folks.
And learn to Compost Everything!
UPDATE:
In this video, I share how to test for Grazon:
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
9 comments
Remember that manure gets used in mushroom production too, so getting mushroom compost is risky too. It bit me. I won’t use that any more.
Could these herbicides sneak in via chicken feed? We are using our chickens manure for gardening and nothing has happened… yet. Is there a good way of feeding chickens to keep them clean?
Unrelated to the post, but how do you keep birds from eating all your mulberries?
They tend to eat some from the top of the tree but we get the middle and lower branches.
My dad sprays grazon on his airfield. One year he sprayed a fence line that I had some sweet potatoes growing on the other side. It nuked the taters, but the good news is the following year I planted snake beans and other stuff in the same patch and it all grew as normal. I think its still fresh when it’s in the manure. Once it’s in the soil it goes away fairly quickly. If it didn’t they wouldn’t have to spray the same field every year. Broadleaf weeds return in the same spots a few months after the grazon is sprayed. I’ve sprayed it myself just helping my dad so in my experience, it doesn’t mess up your bed for very long. Is it good to eat stuff that grows where it was sprayed? That I do not know.
Here’s how I tested for Aminopyralid.
I used the compost I suspected of containing Aminopyralid to make a batch of indigenous microorganism .(check out YouTube: Making Indigenous Micro-organisms (IMO) When it was complete I used it on a grassy area of my yard that contained a lot of weeds. I waited a week or so and sure enough all the weeds died and the grass thrived. I am currently testing non contaminated IMO made from the best soil in my yard from under 100 year old pecan trees to see if the good IMO will “de”contaminate my compost and garden soil. I am also going to add Lactic Acid Bacteria (recipe also on YouTube) to the test for decontamination of the compost.
The stuff really is persistent.
Sorry David, I misspoke about the IMO. It was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv-TOGhwlW4 that I used to test for Aminopyralid.
I have read that microbes can help break down the Aminopyralid faster. Lactic Acid Bacteria and the JADAM Microbial Solution aka JMS are soil microbes. It’ll take time to test, I’ll let you know what, if anything, I find..
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