HelpfulGardener.com

Greetings from Kentucky! ok...
so we have a horse track in town and I had a dumptruck load of aged manure brought last year for my garden. I didn't till it in, I just spread it and planted my garden directly in it. It was very thick and I didn't pull one single weed and the veggies were amazing.

I want to grow produce for local sale and I realize I cannot say the produce is organic, but it would be grown with no chemicals. Someone told me it is very irresponsible to sell the produce grown this way. They also told me that there is a great chance of spreading disease with the veggies grown in the manure this way. I always thought of things like ecoli being topical on food and not grown into it. Can disease and bad stuff grow into the food? I know my garden from last year is not contaminated but I wanted to expand with another load from the track for growing veggies to sell but not if people are put at risk this way.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge with this sort of thing? I am working toward a degree in Agriculture from the local college but it does not cover horticulture.

The standard is that there should be ninety days between application of hot manure and the harvest of food items.

FWIW for the sake of new plants I'd give two weeks rest between the application of hot manure (with a rototilling in between) and seeding or setting out seedling plants.

For my two cents worth of opinion only, composted manure makes this caution moot. Exceptions will follow

Rabbit goat or camelid manures if applied thinly can be used directly near to plants as a side dressing.

Factory fed poultry and swine manure probably aught to be hot composted before application to human consumption gardens.

Humanure* probably should be hot composted and only applied to pasture or orchards. You can then safely use that product to amend your garden.

*Tankage or municipal waste has been tested and found to contain too many heavy metals, and other things not suitable for even indirect human consumption. Use that on a golf course or other non-food use

*slops fed swine manure, should probably be handled like humanure, ie only indirectly for human food consumption.

I am paraphrasing the last time I had a NOFA grower recite how to manage waste-manures, and would encourage you getting your local department of water safety for your local limitations for any of the asterisk starred manures.

Food Safety News published a research article in 2010 where commercial hot composted material was tested for pathogens and they found significant contamination. If professionals are having a hard time making hot composts work I would be even less confident a non-professional could make it work consistently. Also, ATTRA and several universities have online recommendations specifically warning against the assumption that hot composted pig manure is safe. I would always work the manure in early and wait the 90-120 days recommended by the USDA. Even then, I would be cautious about my source.

Artemesia wrote:Food Safety News published a research article in 2010 where commercial hot composted material was tested for pathogens and they found significant contamination. If professionals are having a hard time making hot composts work I would be even less confident a non-professional could make it work consistently. Also, ATTRA and several universities have online recommendations specifically warning against the assumption that hot composted pig manure is safe. I would always work the manure in early and wait the 90-120 days recommended by the USDA. Even then, I would be cautious about my source.

Depending on where they're raised (CAFO? "factory farming"), pigs can be anywhere from completely vegetarian to almost completely carnivorous. Even so, I would hesitate to use the manure of even vegetarian pigs in compost, simply because I don't consume pork or pork products and find the idea somewhat beyond my personal scope.

For more "centrist" gardeners, though, I think the question comes down to, What have the pigs been fed? and gardeners have almost no way of finding out, reliably, *what* the pigs have been fed.

Better safe than sorry, so you're correct: no pig manure in the compost.

And if you have a link to the Food Safety News (not so much as the precise url, but a month or issue date: Spring? March/April, if it's a bimonthly, etc.), I'd like to go looking. Thank you! This is a particular interest of mine, as you'll see if you Search

toxoplasmosis otters

here at the forum.

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

Here is the Food Safety News article:

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/05/researchers-find-pathogens-in-compost/

I would be very interested in what others think of this article.