Renewable Farming

Ideas that enhance soil biology, capture natural nutrients and please your neighbors

Today, a coalition of 24 environmental and animal rights organization petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce rural air pollution regulations much more strictly. They say EPA’s 2005 compromise on pollution from confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs) leaves many communities in a “purgatory of legalized air pollution.”

October 28, 2021  The environmental organizers sense that this administration is likely to take aggressive action against some or all of the country’s 13,900 CAFOs.

Here’s an answer which could head off abrupt, costly regulations and keep your neighborhood peaceful. 

Ag consultant Jim Martindale just posted a new video showing how his CurseBuster tillage tool teams up with a microbial product that sharply reduces pit manure odors.

Here’s a link to a short video showing Jim explaining how his CurseBuster is the ideal tool for integrating surface-spread pit manure inoculated with a biological digester, Safenure. Odors are reduced so much that manure injection isn’t necessary, and more nutrient value is converted into crop yields. In the video, Beau Popejoy with New Solutions Ag describes examples of Safenure’s biological benefits.

Here are some of the payoffs when you use a CurseBuster to work surface-applied liquid manure into the top three or four inches.

1. First, the Safenure organisms digest much of the ammonia and other volatile compounds in your manure pit, so you have healthier hogs above the concrete slats. 

2. At the 5-minute point in the video, Jim Martindale transitions into ways that surface application of liquid manure and CurseBuster’s vertical tillage dramatically enhance aerobic biological activity in the top three inches of your soil.

3. Jim also explains that over several seasons, your soil nitrogen profile transitions toward greater available nitrogen in the root zone. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria and other beneficials in the top three inches, energized with nutrients percolating from partially digested manure, enhance root mycorrhizal multiplication.

4. Complementing those mycorrhizae, the CurseBuster does not rip up networks of beneficial fungi. Fungal organisms perform much of the digestion jobs, reducing crop residue lignin and cellulose into active humus.

We published a more detailed description of the CurseBuster’s biological benefits July 5, 2021. Martindale says his best customers for his CurseBuster vertical tillage implement are no-till farmers. The main CurseBuster website is at this link. There’s also a YouTube channel with 42 videos covering the history of its development — visit this link.

Jim Martindale with a CurseBuster tillage implement