Enhanced Manure Management Project

Helps farms adopt precision ag technology and state of the art equipment and application techniques:

Reduce nutrient and odor emissions
Improve soil health
Improve crop productivity
Reduce reliance on commercial fertilizer to build more sustainable farms.
Reduce greenhouse gas / increase carbon sequestration

Why Enhanced Manure Management Services Here?

Delaware County is home to two very sensitive watershed; the Delaware River Watershed, which contains two of New York City’s drinking water reservoirs, and the Susquehanna River Watershed, which drains ultimately into the Chesapeake Bay. Both watersheds have very active conservation programs working with farms to implement manure nutrient management, and given the sensitive nature of these watershed, helping our farms get to even greater levels of manure nutrient management is of great value.

The enhanced manure management strategies we are employing through this project include:

Shallow disk-coulter manure injection;
Precision application of manure using digital field manure prescriptions, precision ag-controlled manure applications, and digital as-applied manure mapping;
Improving manure application timing by more applications near and in the crop growing season.

Another reason for the existence of our program, is that the small farms in our region have financial barriers to accessing the technology, equipment and labor to employ the strategies on their own. We saw the need to facilitate the development of full-service custom manure handling and application services that did not exist in our region to invest in the technology and equipment and provide the labor that our farms individually could not invest in. And it made sense to help build one service to make these investments and serve many farms.

Through partnership between local conservation programs and a private sector custom manure application services business, Albanos Precision Application, we are implementing the Enhanced Manure Management Services our farm, and watersheds,

This work is supported by the Conservation Innovation Grants program at USDA NRCS and by Climate Resilient Farming Grant program at NYS Ag & Markets through awards to Delaware County Soil & Water Conservation District.