The Moos Room™

[music]
[Cow mooing]
Joe: Well, welcome to The Moos Room everybody, the OG three are here. That is correct, Bradley is here. He's listening mostly. He's driving right now but he's alive. We found him, he's doing okay.
Emily: We will remain a podcast about cattle production. We're not going to be a true crime podcast.
Joe: We're not.
Emily: That's the good news.
Joe: We found Bradley, he's doing good. He's fine. His connection's not great. [laughter] We might not hear from him but trust us he's there. More importantly, we have a guest today and she's been on the podcast before, so we are not going to skew our results by asking again. This is where Bradley and I prove that we're not biased because her answer last time was Jerseys. We're not going to ask again, even though we could and we want to.
Bradley: It's double [inaudible 00:00:59].
Joe: [laughs] I don't know what you just said, Brad.
Emily: Brad, you're in a crappy spot right now, maybe don't talk for a while. [laughs]
Joe: Maybe don't talk.
[laughter]
Emily: [unintelligible 00:01:11] Okay. All right, back on the rails.
Joe: Melissa Wilson is joining us today. She is the manure specialist at the University of Minnesota, does all sorts of research but she alerted us to a very important paper, which is going to be the basis of what we're doing today. Thanks for being here, Melissa.
Melissa: Yes, thanks for having me. Always love talking crap with you all.
Joe: Exactly, exactly.
Emily: We love having you to talk crap.
Joe: The more poop puns, the better.
Emily: Yes. [laughs]
Melissa: I'm sure I can handle that for you. Thanks.
Joe: We're not going to waste any time. We're going to get right into it. What we're talking about today is a concept called manure sheds, like a watershed manure shed. Melissa, can you just give us an overview of what a manure shed is or what it's supposed to be?
Melissa: A manure shed is basically all of the land that you would need to safely apply manure to meet nutrient demands of your crop, and that does include all the nutrients. It means you wouldn't be over-applying one or the other. You would be applying as much as the crop needs and not more than that, so how much land do you need to satisfy all of those needs?
It can be on different scales. You can have a farm-size manure shed but then you have to think about, are there livestock operations near me that might overlap, so there can be regional manure sheds and then there's even to the national scale where we have a lot of poultry production in the Carolinas, for instance. Thinking about where that is in relation to other poultry production around the country.
It's really trying to think about how we can best utilize manure and all of the nutrients, especially in years right now where fertilizer prices are very, very high. How can we best utilize those nutrients and minimize environmental consequences?
Joe: That's the key that we always have to keep in mind is minimizing the environmental consequences while getting the most out of this natural fertilizer that we have. Specifically, the paper is talking mostly about dairies and we'll talk about this paper. This paper is relatively recent and it did some evaluations of manure sheds or potential manure sheds and dairy systems in different areas of the country. One of those being Minnesota specifically as a case study. It's pretty interesting and it's fun to have data that's specific to Minnesota, which is always something that we're looking for. Melissa, what are the challenges with manure management and manure sheds on dairies in general? I know there's been a lot of changes in the last 10, 15, 20 years with dairies. How have those affected this concept?
Melissa: There's a couple of things going on. I'll talk about manure sheds in general and what are some of the challenges and then I'll talk about what are specific challenges to specific farms. I think with manure sheds some of the biggest issues are we can do some of these calculations and simulate where the manure nutrients are and how far they need to go but then logistically how do we get that manure out there where it needs to be? Especially when you do have overlapping places where we have manure from different species, other dairy farms, whatever it is. The logistics of getting it spread for a decent cost [chuckles] is one of the biggest challenges for these manure sheds. We know what we need to do, how do we actually get it done?
When it comes to individual farms, yes, we've definitely seen a lot of changes over the last few decades. One of the big things we're seeing is that a lot of manure storage systems have gone to liquid storage and unfortunately, that means it's heavier, right? You have a lot more liquid mixed in a lot more water, so it makes it harder to transport the concentrated nutrients further. That's one of the challenges we see with manure sheds again is just how do we move a heavier nutrient source, so to speak further distances.
In some industries you have a lot of centralization like turkeys, hogs, there's a lot more. One company controls the feed, they control where the pigs go, et cetera. With dairy especially, it's not quite as centralized, so how do you work with everyone in your region to make sure that the manure is getting where it needs to be? Then you have again these other challenges with other production systems. Yes, there's definitely a lot of challenges going on.
The cool thing about liquid is that it tends to have a higher ratio of available nutrients than a solid manure does. There is some trade-offs, you do get more first-year available nitrogen with a liquid storage system usually than you do a solid system. One of the other big challenges is just that storage system can be leaky. Especially for nitrogen, and I don't mean physically [chuckles] leaky necessarily but just nitrogen can escape as a gas too.
Sometimes that offsets the nutrient ratio that crops need and that again makes it challenging for these manure sheds too. Because you want to be able to spread one rate and get all the nutrients you need but usually that means you're over-applying one nutrient or the other because nitrogen tends to be lost in the storage system but phosphorus tends to stay so that means you get closer nitrogen to phosphorous ratios than you would want when you're thinking about crop production.
Emily: Okay, speaking of the ratios, that brings up the question that popped into my head. How do I say this? The level of specificity that's needed in this as far as testing the manure to know what those ratios are of the various nutrients, testing the soil to see what the needs are, that seems like something that takes a lot of work and you need to put in the time to do that to make the manure shed effective I would imagine. Can you speak a little more to some of that Melissa?
Melissa: Yes, I know here in Minnesota, I think some of the bigger operations that are permitted have to test at minimum every three to four years. If you have a system that is very consistent year after year, you're always feeding the same thing, then you'll probably get fairly consistent manure values. I've found with dairies though and beef operations that sometimes the feed changes throughout the year based on what you can get. I suggest testing as frequently as you can, once a year if you could, and making sure you get a really good sample. You want to invest some time into making sure that you're getting something that's representative of what's going out into your field.
If you go out there with a scoop and just scoop something off at the top of your pit [chuckles] that's not going to be really representative because some of the nutrients will settle to the bottom. You want to get a sample when it's really well agitated or if you're doing solid manure systems and you have a stockpile or something you want to get from stuff from the middle, stuff from the top, stuff from the bottom, tend to avoid the crust because that's been dried out and soaked and whatnot by the sun and the weather. Taking some time to get a really representative sample is going to be important. Once that goes to the lab, then you don't have to deal with some of the variability too, if you have bedding and all of that thing. They'll take a very small sample, so making sure you get a good sample, to begin with, is going to be really important.
Then with soil testing, doing those regularly as well. I like to think of it as an accounting method. You need to know what you have in your bank, in your soil, to know how much you have to add to be able to get what you want, so your crops' production for instance. Having all of those is definitely going to be important for this manure shed concept and really thinking about where can we get the best bang for a buck for all these nutrients and thinking about how we can offset fertilizer, right? Manure is a homegrown fertilizer source. The better we can utilize it, the less fertilizers we have to purchase in the long run.
Joe: Melissa, one of the things that I hear when I talk to farmers is that they're usually testing soils only as often as they're absolutely required and what comes up for me is either way the manure has to go somewhere. If they test and they're using manure really, really efficiently and they're putting it on at the correct level, what do they do with leftover manure if they have it? What can they do with it if they're running out of space to put it and fields to spread it on because they're trying to be responsible with what they're putting on their fields?
Melissa: Ideally you'd be able to work with some local neighbors that can potentially use manure, especially crop farmers who would be purchasing fertilizer anyway, help offset some of their purchases. We've seen interesting things going on with fertilizer prices being so high. We've been getting a lot of questions about what the value is of manure. Thinking about one, the cost of applying it, cost of applying manure is going to be higher than it is to apply fertilizer. You probably can't charge the same amount as fertilizer prices are right now, but you can certainly get a higher price than you can when fertilizer prices are low.
I think being really responsible and explaining what application rates you're applying and how the crop farmer can best utilize it, what they can expect for first-year nitrogen from the manure, second-year, et cetera, can go a long way into helping them better understand it because sometimes crop farmers haven't used manure in a long time and it is more complicated than fertilizer. Really helping them understand the benefits and how to use it properly can go a long way into hopefully convincing them to continue using it in the future.
Joe: When we talk about manure and how it gets transported even if there's custom spreading services, what I see and what this paper talks about is that those systems are definitely fairly limited. They're very local and a lot of times they're really informal. You just call someone you know down the road. Is there any more formalized system for that when we're talking about distributing manure off the dairy, just exporting it from the dairy, and having it be used somewhere else?
Melissa: Right now there's not. I know there's been some thought going into, we transport feed all these places. Is there a way to then transport the manure back to where the feed came from, that sort of thing? I don't know that I've heard of that happening at least anywhere in Minnesota, but there are thoughts of how to do that in the future. In Minnesota, we're not as land-poor, so to speak, as other areas. When I was working out in Maryland, there is a lot of poultry production on the Delmarva Peninsula.
They're locked in. It's hard to transport that manure further away. They're unfortunately suffering from that where their soil test levels of their phosphorus have skyrocketed to the point where the soil just can't hold onto phosphorus anymore, so it just leeches out and usually, phosphorus doesn't leach. This is a very concerning issue that they have there. They have to figure out how to get that manure back to where the feed was coming from. Like I said, in Minnesota, we have some places where there's probably more manure than is needed, but it's not nearly as imperative as it is on the East Coast there.
Joe: This paper talks a lot about the challenges on the East Coast and it makes me glad that we're in Minnesota for a lot of reasons, but specifically talking about Minnesota with this paper, they're talking about, especially the trend of what dairies look like in Minnesota a lot and it has influenced what dairies they looked at in Minnesota for their case study of this manure shed concept. The trend, as we all know, is towards fewer larger dairies and because of that, for this study, they looked at big dairies with at least 1,000 animal units and they identified 90 of those in the state.
That's what they're looking at when they look at these study. They broke them down into a couple different categories but basically, a lot of it broke down into less than 5,000 or more than 5,000. They broke it down further in a couple different areas but big dairies, 1,000 animal units or more using storage ponds. We talked about liquid manure already, large barns, so large freestyle barns with liquid manure handling is the dairy that we're talking about in Minnesota for this paper.
What we've all been waiting to get to and Bradley and I are super excited about is that there's potentially a difference in the size of breeds when it comes to manure. Melissa, can you set that difference up for us and what this paper looked at as far as the difference in size of cattle?
Melissa: This is really the interesting thing and why I sent you all this paper is that smaller cattle like Jerseys tend to poop less than larger species like Holsteins. That means on a per animal basis or per cow basis, there is less nutrients and less manure generated for a Jersey cow than there is a Holstein. Environmentally speaking, that can be good. What's interesting though is when you talk about feed though, so feed going into a Jersey or a Holstein and manure coming out, that actually doesn't change. It doesn't matter what gut it goes through, it's the same coming out the backend, but the fact that Jerseys eat less and then, therefore, poop less means that on a per cow basis they would have a smaller manure shed, so to speak.
Now on the other hand, since they're smaller these operations may have more of them. Theoretically, if they just compensate for the smaller cattle by having more cattle, it probably all evens out in the end. This paper was really interesting talking and identifying that there is differences in these different types of cattle. One of the cool things that they did is they found out that most of the really large, I think it was nine really large dairies in Minnesota, I can't remember how many, it was over 5,000 I think, 72% were primarily Jerseys versus it was like 90% Holsteins at the smaller or from 1,000 up to 5,000. That was interesting.
I don't know if that holds true in other states that the really, really large dairies are going towards Jerseys but it sounds like it's because they're going to cheese production rather than fluid milk production. That was another interesting thing about this paper. They looked at just the energy content of the milk. If you look at like fat content of milk, Jerseys may be more sustainable because they have a lower manure footprint, but they also have a lower carbon footprint than Holsteins do. If you're aiming for cheese production, Jerseys may be the way to go. I think it depends on what your animal unit size is and it's per cow. Per cow, the Jerseys have less manure than Holsteins do. Again, if you're overcompensating by having more Jerseys then it's equal if you have the same weight of a cow on your operation.
Bradley: You're right Melissa. I think most of these dairies, if they have, because you can fit more Jerseys with a permit than you can Holstein, they're just compensating. Maybe in the end it probably doesn't matter from a whole farm site, from manure management.
Melissa: I just thought it was interesting too though that there are these differences between the different cows but when it comes down to the gut, the gut still does the exact same thing regardless. What goes in must come out and that part doesn't change. It doesn't matter if it's a Jersey or a Holstein in that case.
Emily: In theory, you're getting the same product, it's just going through a different manufacturer as it were.
Melissa: Yes, exactly.
Joe: Basically, what the paper concludes is less so about the breeds and I know we're jokingly playing up the fact that Jerseys are better because they are, but Emily's not happy with that comment. I think she's going to let it go for now. The paper concludes that it's not necessarily about the breed. When we're talking about sustainability and efficiency, what we're looking at for cheese production specifically is a smaller cow with higher components and a longer lifespan. That's pretty straightforward. I don't know a whole lot of farmers that are totally against that.
There might be some people on the show circuit that don't want that smaller cow, but when we're talking commercial dairy operations looking for cheese production, a smaller cow, I don't care what breed with higher components and a longer lifespan is the answer, and I think most farmers know that. It's nice to have some papers that really lay out all the reasoning behind it including the manure side of things to why we probably should be trending that direction.
Melissa: I think that's been really important too is sometimes we're not really thinking about what's coming out of the back end. If we start thinking of these systems holistically, I think we really need to move in that direction if we're going to stay in business so to speak.
Emily: That's a good point, Melissa. I do want to keep bringing it back to the manure shed piece. As Joe said, Joseph and Bradley were really excited to play up the Jersey is better than Holstein that this paper presents for us. Getting back to the manure shed piece, it sounds like really as long as your manure shed system balanced [unintelligible 00:19:19] it works for you. Maybe you do have all Holsteins, but you do have a lot of land around you and your manure shed balance is out that the more so the moral of the story here.
Melissa: Absolutely. I think we just need to start thinking about nutrient balances coming in and off the farm. If you're paying for feed, why wouldn't you try to use those nutrients even if it's coming out of the back end of the cow? You still want to try to use those nutrients to the best of your ability so that you're not having to pay for fertilizer too. Why pay for the nutrient twice and just let it sit in your soil or let it escape somewhere else to the environment? The more we can try to get thinking along those lines, the better off we're going to be sustainability-wise.
Emily: We know that feed is the biggest expense on any dairy farm, so get more bang for your buck. Like you said Melissa, those nutrients are going in, but they're coming out too.
Melissa: Exactly.
Emily: They're there ready for the using.
Joe: The paper, like I said talks a lot about the difference between Jerseys and Holsteins, and most of their analysis when they're talking about the direct comparison between those two breeds has to do with the energy-corrected milk. Therefore, the butter fat does play a huge piece in that analysis. Again, it all comes back to cheese for most of this paper and looking at the manure per unit of energy-corrected milk.
Jerseys in that way they're claiming are better. Again, it's more about smaller cow and more efficient with high components and a long lifespan. That's the answer. I know a lot of Holstein farms that have incredibly high butter fat and they can make that work. It's a lot less about the Jersey-Holstein comparison, although the Jerseys, as Brad and I know, are better and cuter and all sorts of other things.
Melissa: So cute.
Joe: They're so cute. I know.
Emily: I am tired of this Jersey propaganda. That's not what this podcast is about.
Joe: We'll move on. Emily is getting for real frustrated, not just pretend frustrated. We're going to move on.
Emily: My nostrils are flaring, that's how Joe knows.
Joe: [laughs] We're going to move on to more of the farm-specific stuff for Minnesota and talk about some of the things that came out of this study and what they looked at. One of the things that was looked at was how far are we taking manure away from these farms.
Melissa: I know there's some other survey data for Minnesota too that I'm familiar with. I believe at least the other survey data, it was like 1.2 miles for especially liquid systems is the average. I think that included any liquid, so liquid hog manure, et cetera. I think with dairy it's probably less than a mile.
Joe: What they saw in this paper was that they looked at a six-year period, 2014 to 2019 and they saw that the straight line travel distance between manure storage and the field was actually fairly different depending on the size of the operation. For a one to 2000 cow or animal unit operation, on average they were traveling 1.4 kilometers. Sorry, it's in kilometers 1.4 kilometers
Melissa: 0.8 miles?
Joe: 0.8 miles and for the 2,000 to 5,000 cow dairies, they were traveling 2.1 kilometers
Melissa: Or 1.3 miles.
Joe: 1.3 miles. Then for the dairies that were larger than 5,000 animal units, they were traveling 4.1 kilometers.
Melissa: That's two and a half miles.
Joe: Two and a half miles. Does that make sense to you, Melissa, more cows, the farther on average they had to go to get rid of their manure?
Melissa: Yes, I believe so. I think the under-a-mile number that I got included all sizes of operations, not just these over 1000 animal unit operations. I think it makes sense. The more cattle you have, the more manure you have, the further you're going to have to go out to get all of it spread. What was interesting about this is that sometimes we just look at it like, all right, I have manure storage for a year. We just look at one year of where can I apply manure to.
What this study did is they looked at a six-year period and they actually have a database where they can tell what kind of crops are grown on a field in any given year. They wouldn't apply it to a soybean field for instance. This incorporates that rotational effect. Like on average, how far would you have to go assuming that some of these fields are going to be soybean, some of these fields are going to be alfalfa, et cetera? Sometimes we don't think about that.
Joe: Would you change your rotation based on how much manure you're expecting to need to use?
Melissa: That is one way to consider it. They talked a little bit about this too, is if you grow continuous silage corn that needs more nutrients. You could potentially have fields where you just do that and then have those every year for manure application. The one problem with corn silage is that it's pretty hard on the soil. It's pretty hard on your soil health. It's not great in those respects, the environmental respects to keep growing corn year after year.
It's also hard on weeds or weeds can get resistant. It's hard on insects or I guess hard on the corn for insects. Insects love it when you grow the same thing year after year. Having the rotational effects really helps with other aspects of it. I think it was alfalfa, they looked at three-year-old alfalfa, six years of corn that needed a decent amount of nutrients, but they were assuming you didn't apply manure at all during the alfalfa years or the first year after alfalfa for corn because alfalfa supplies a lot of nutrients. Just things like that you can potentially change your rotation to account for nutrients and that is one way that we can manage this.
Joe: One of the things that they're saying here in the paper is that it really does matter to look at it like you said over this six-year time period and include the analysis of what crops are grown in those areas because they're saying that if we were to look at this on a one-year basis versus a six-year basis, with the six-year basis and knowing what crops are grown, we would need 81% more land with that analysis for that manure shed rather than just looking at a single year.
It makes me scared. I'm not going to lie. A lot of this as I read this paper seems like the issue is I have too much manure for the land that I have. Eventually, it feels like I'm going to run out of places to put it and I don't know what to do with it, especially if we don't start treating it like a commodity that we can use consistently in the marketplace.
Melissa: I think that is one of the drawbacks of some of these larger operations too. As you get bigger, you have more manure. That means you need further and further out more and more land to be able to apply it and then that's less likely that you control that land. Then it gets more complicated. There's a lot of social aspects you have to think about and there can be those years where maybe neighbors just don't want it for some reason, so you have to go even further out. It becomes a big social issue too as we move into these larger and larger systems.
Joe: What do we do? Let's first talk about what are the biggest barriers to treating manure like a commodity. I think we've mentioned a few of them, but let's go over them again.
Melissa: I think the biggest one is that there's a lot of liquid associated with these liquid systems, of course, a lot of water in it basically. I see potential ways to help with this is there's a lot of new technologies coming on the market or more and more farms are starting to look at these alternative technologies. Dewatering, liquid-solid separation can be helpful.
There's operations that are moving back to solid systems, believe it or not, so that they can do composting. Composting reduces the volume by half. Plus, you get a really nice product that people are more willing to buy. I could go to Home Depot here in the Twin Cities and find composted cow manure that someone sells to Home Depot. I can't go and buy a bag of raw manure. We'll put it that way. It becomes a more sellable product.
There's also interesting things happening where there's regional digesters that are looking at coming into Minnesota. It's energy companies that want to harvest the energy from the manure and then they'll treat it, they'll do a bunch of mixing, they actually send back a product to the farms that can have a lot of benefits, possibly fewer weed seeds, possibly different nitrogen dephosphorus ratios, all kinds of interesting things. It depends on what all of their feedstocks are besides manure. That is another thing if it's more nutrient dense that can help make it a more sellable product or a product that you want to move further.
I think that the big thing is how can we get this liquid manure as liquid fertilizer further out. I think the technology is going to get there, especially if fertilizer prices stay as high as there are, we're going to be looking for more domestic sources and ways to get that spread further. Unfortunately, it hits us hard in the beginning here because fertilizer prices and feed prices are so high, but we're hoping that it drives some innovation in the manure treatment side of things.
Joe: What about the innovation on the phosphorus side? We talk a lot about it and we talked about it today that this is just a limiting factor for a lot of places. Is there anything going on that is a potential solution for that problem?
Melissa: Yes. There's interesting things going on with some of this liquid-solid separation. Don't know all the chemistry behind it, but there is a crystal that can be formed called struvite from manures and the struvite can then be added like a fertilizer. They're trying to figure out ways to pelletize it, make it easily spread like you would just in a normal spreader. There are systems that are looking in how to get energy from manure, then they would further treat it to get struvite out to precipitate out nitrogen. They separate these two different things so that way you can then recombine them in more traditional fertilizers so that they're easier to use, but also the more correct crop ratio.
Joe: When we talk about this, especially when we talk about developing markets for manure and trying to market that as a separate product potentially, it sounds like more time and more labor, which is really short on dairies. How do you think people are going to find time to do this? Is it just going to be pure necessity that pushes them to have to, or is there other strategies you can think of that would take less time to get these things done?
Melissa: That's a good question. I think in that case, that's where I like the idea and I'm not an economist so I don't know how much all this costs and everything but I like the idea of these regional operations because then it would be maintained by a separate company who's dealing with it and if they are bringing back the product, they're coming to pick up the manure, bringing back another product on their way back. It theoretically could blend in with your current operations or they could at least figure out ways to. I like this regional approach.
In some cases, I've seen some farms where they've had family members come back to the farm and they didn't really know where to fit them in in the operation, so they took over this piece of it. I know there's a big composting operation that we work with where they have two full-time people just working on the composting side and they're really interested in it. They're making it work and they're trying out new things. It's really cool to see but they were really dedicated to it and they wanted to be part of the operation but wanted to have their own niche. I think there are ways to work it in but you're right, it does take more time doing this.
Joe: The paper has a word that they use, which makes me laugh because it's a manure broker and for me, I want to change that to manure jockey. Instead of a cattle jockey, it's a manure jockey and that's what you're describing with these regional systems, right? Someone's going to have to go and procure this manure, make an agreement with a dairy to then get it to this regionalized location. There is a potential in the future we'll be saying manure jockeys or poop jockeys.
Melissa: I think some of that already exists in some of the other areas. I don't know if it exists as much for dairy but like for poultry litter there are brokers that figure out where to get it and where it's going to go and they figure out all the pricing and stuff like that. I think, yes. Especially if fertilizer and feed prices stay as high as they are, I think we're going to start seeing more and more of these operations pop up because we can make nitrogen fertilizer out of the air but it's going to cost a lot. [chuckles] If we can use manure and try to reutilize some of these other nitrogen sources, I think it's going to be beneficial.
Joe: I want to get back to manure sheds a little bit. We talked about what they are, what they have the potential to be but what's the end goal of identifying what a manure shed is, how big it is, and is the goal to have more targeted regulation on what happens within that manure shed? What's the end goal of identifying these areas?
Melissa: I don't know if it's regulation based, mostly because there are national manure sheds, right? We need to start thinking about this more holistically. I think the goal is educational in nature to think about these manure sheds and how can we think of the big picture rather than just the day-to-day I need to get this manure applied and get it out of my way. [laughs] If we can start thinking about balancing these nutrients on our farms, I think one that's going to push our sustainability agendas. We would like to have good healthy food and protect our water, protect our air and we need to think about manure. It's a key piece of that.
Joe: We've established a couple of really important things today. Smaller cows are better. AKA Jerseys tend to look better when it comes to manure management based on an energy-corrected milk per manure unit basis. Is that enough modifiers to say the Jerseys are better, Emily?
Emily: You're just laying it on thick Joe, whatever.
Joe: We also identified that these manure sheds are a new concept. We're hoping that they provide more of a educational role than a regulatory role and I think most importantly, just because to me it's fascinating, we've identified that there is a real possibility of manure jockeys in our future on the dairy side. Potentially the bee side as well, or manure brokers as they're more PC referred to.
Emily: Joe, are you thinking about a career change?
Joe: Maybe.
Emily: You wanna be a manure jockey?
Joe: I just want to be able to put it on the CV or the resume.
Emily: Business cards, yes.
Joe: Business card. It just seems like something that--
Emily: Twitter handle, all of it.
Joe: Oh, so good.
Melissa: Is your logo going to be, no one stands behind my work?
Joe: No one stands behind my work, maybe. We shouldn't be sharing stuff like that where everyone can hear it and now someone's going to steal it.
[laughter]
Melissa: Oh, I've totally just stolen it from other smarter people than I and funnier people than I.
Joe: Any last thoughts, Melissa on this and the concept of manure sheds in general and what it means to Minnesota?
Melissa: I think really starting to think about the whole picture is going to be important. I know no one wants to think about poop, and because it's stinky and we just don't want to deal with it but moving forward it's just going to have to be what it's going to have to be. Getting ahead of ourselves and thinking about it now before it becomes a regulatory thing is going to be important because on the East Coast, it's already moved that way. As we're starting to think about what could come out here, that is certainly one area that people are starting to think about. Getting ahead of the game is going to be important.
Joe: You heard it. Get ahead of the game. Don't be like the East Coast. Let's be proactive about this. Try to get ahead of things so that it doesn't become a forced regulatory situation.
Melissa: Let's spread the wealth. There's lots of benefits to manure besides the nutrients. Getting it spread on as much land as possible with thinner layers over more land can help spread the wealth of soil health and all that stuff.
Joe: Let's end on that note. Thank you for being here, Melissa. We really appreciate it.
Melissa: Thanks for having me again.
Joe: All right, Emily, wrap us up.
Emily: If you have any questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals about today's episode, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: If you have a question that you would like us to answer on a future episode of The Moos Room, you can call us and leave us a voicemail at 612-624-3610. You can also follow us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom @UMNFarmSafety, and you can follow Melissa @ManureProf. That's @ManureP-R-O-F. If you're interested in learning more about Melissa's work, you can visit her lab's webpage at wilsonlab.cfans.umn.edu. That's enough plugs for this episode. Bye
Melissa: Bye.
Bradley: Jerseys are better.
Emily: [sighs] Brad like.
[laughter]
Joe: Well, I think we hammered that messaging home, at least.
[laughter]
Emily: I kept my mouth shut for most of the time.
Joe: I was very impressed with your restraint.
[laughter]
Emily: A vision of restraint.
[cow mooing]
[00:37:30] [END OF AUDIO]

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