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As you know Arkansas produces a significant amount of litter due to the magnitude of the
poultry industry in the state. For years, we have looked at the potential of using poultry
litter as a fertilizer source for our crops. While poultry litter can be a good source
of nutrients, chicken litter is not fertilizer. In order to take full advantage of this material
there are a couple of things we need to do. First we need to have an idea of the concentration
of nutrients in the material we are going to use. And we need to analyze the litter
as close to planting as possible. The cost of analyzing the litter is 20 dollars per
sample. The table shows the average of a hundred samples received by the diagnostic lab. The
table shows an average of 55, 60, 63 per ton. The use of the average can significantly under
or over estimate the amount of nutrients in the material. For instance the K levels can
range between twenty-five and ninety-one pounds per ton. The analysis will also give you an
idea of the moisture content. You don’t want to spread a material that is half water.
Note that the table shows moisture content as high as 64 percent. The other very important
difference from chemical fertilizer has to do with the way it is applied. [Picture of
a spreader. Proper spreader calibration is very important!] We need to make sure that
the spreader trucks are properly calibrated. Research in Colorado with ten spreaders show
that one of the spreaders had one side with seven-and-a-half times the amount of litter
on it, compared, on one side, compared to the other side. They also reported swath width
ranging from seven-and-a-half feet to sixteen-and-a-half feet with an average of eleven feet. So in
summary we need to test the litter for the amount of plant available nutrients and we
need to make sure the spreaders are calibrated. Your Arkansas Soybean Podcast is a production
of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and was funded in part by the
Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board. For more information about soybean farming in Arkansas,
contact your local county Extension office.