Manure

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Manure

Manure is organic matter used as organic fertilizer

Organic fertilizer

Naturally occurring organic matter fertilizers include manure, slurry, worm castings, peat, seaweed, sewage, and guano. Green manure crops are also grown to add nutrients to the soil....
in agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
. Manures contribute to the fertility of the soil by adding organic matter and nutrients

Nutrient

A nutrient is a chemical that an organism needs to live and grow or a substance used in an organism's metabolism which must be taken in from its environment....
, such as nitrogen

Nitrogen

Nitrogen is a chemical element that has the symbol N and atomic number 7 and atomic mass 14.00674?. Elemental nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless and mostly inert diatomic gas at standard conditions, constituting 78% by volume of Earth's atmosphere....
that is trapped by bacteria in the soil. Higher organisms then feed on the fungi

Fungus

A fungus is a Eukaryote organism that is a member of the Kingdom Fungi . The fungi are a monophyletic group, also called the Eumycota , that is phylogeny distinct from the morphologically similar slime molds and water molds ....
and bacteria in a chain of life that comprises the soil food web

Soil food web

The soil food web is the community of organisms living all or part of their lives in the soil. It describes a complex living system in the soil and how it interacts with the environment, plants, and animals....
.

In the past the term "manure" included inorganic fertilizer

Fertilizer

Fertilizers are chemical compounds given to plants to promote growth; they are usually applied either through the soil, for uptake by plant roots, or by foliar feeding, for uptake through leaves....
s, but this usage is now very rare.

word manure came from Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman conquest of England of 1066 and about 1470, when the #Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press into England by William...
manuren meaning "to cultivate land", itself from French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
main-oeuvre, "hand work", referring to the work of cultivation.

e are three main classes of manures used in soil

Soil

Soil is the naturally occurring, unconsolidated or loose covering on the Earth's surface. Soil is composed of particles of broken rock that have been altered by chemical and environmental processes including weathering and erosion....
management:

animal manure is feces

Feces

Feces, faeces, or f?ces is a waste product from an animal's gastrointestinal tract expelled through the anus during defecation....
or plant material (often straw) which has been used as bedding for animals and thus includes their feces and urine

Urine

Urine is a liquid waste product of the body secreted by the kidneys by a process of filtration from blood called urination and excreted through the urethra....
.

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Etymology

The word manure came from Middle English

Middle English

French language

Types

There are three main classes of manures used in soil

Soil

Animal manures

Most animal manure is feces

Feces

Urine

Urine is a liquid waste product of the body secreted by the kidneys by a process of filtration from blood called urination and excreted through the urethra....
. Manure from different animals may have different qualities and require different application rates. Common forms of animal manure include FYM (farmyard manure) or farm slurry (liquid manure) from farm animals such as horse

Horse

The horse is a hoofed mammal, a subspecies of one of seven extant species of the family Equidae. The horse has evolution of the horse over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, odd-toed ungulate animal of today....
s, cattle

Cattle

Cattle, colloquially referred to as cows, are domestication ungulates, a member of the subfamily Bovinae of the family Bovidae. They are raised as livestock for meat , dairy products , leather and as draft animals ....
, pig

Pig

Pigs, also called hogs or swine, are a genus of even-toed ungulates within the Family Suidae. The name pig, hog, or swine most commonly refers to the Domestic pig in everyday parlance, but technically encompasses several distinct species, including the Wild Boar....
s or sheep

Sheep

#REDIRECT Domestic sheep...
, chicken

Chicken

The chicken is a Domestication fowl. Recent evidence suggests that domestication of the chicken was under way in Vietnam over 10,000 years ago....
and turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in southwest Asia and Thrace in the Balkans region of Southern Europe....
manures, rabbit

Rabbit

Rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world. There are seven different genus in the family taxonomy as rabbits, including the European rabbit , Cottontail rabbit , and the Amami rabbit ....
manure, human sewage

Sewage

Sewage is the mainly liquid waste containing some solids produced by humans which typically consists of washing water, feces, urine, laundry waste and other material which goes down Plumbing fixture from households and industry....
and guano

Guano

Guano is the excrement of seabirds, bats, and Harbor Seal.Guano manure is an effective fertilizer and gunpowder ingredient due to its high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen and also its lack of odor....
from seabird

Seabird

Seabirds are birds that have adaptation to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behavior and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same environmental problems and feeding ecological niche have resulted in similar adaptations....
s and bat

Bat

Bats are mammals in the order Chiroptera. The forelimbs of all bats are developed as wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of sustained flight ....
s. Agricultural manure in liquid form is known as slurry

Slurry

A slurry is, in general, a thick suspension of solids in a liquid and may be:* A mixture of water and cement to form concrete* A mixture of water, thickening agent#weapon use, and oxidizers used as an water gel...
.

Animal manures may also include other animal products, such as wool

Wool

Wool is the fiber derived from the specialized skin cells, called follicles, of animals in the Caprinae family, principally domestic sheep, but the hair of certain species of other Mammalia such as cashmere goat, llamas, rabbits and keeshonds may also be called wool....
shoddy (and other hair

Hair

Hair is a protein filament that epidermal growth from hair follicle deep within the dermis. The fine, soft hair found on many nonhuman mammals is typically called fur; wool is the characteristically curly hair found on sheep and goats....
), feather

Feather

Feathers are one of the epidermal growths that form the distinctive outer covering, or plumage, on birds. They are considered the most complex integumentary structures found in vertebrates....
s, blood

Blood

Blood is a specialized bodily fluid that delivers necessary substances to the body's Cell s ? such as nutrients and oxygen ? and transports waste products away from those same cells....
and bone

Bone

Bones are rigid organ that form part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They function to move, support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red blood cell and white blood cells and store minerals....
.

Compost

Compost is the decomposed remnants of organic materials – usually of plant origin, but often including some animal dung or bedding.

Plant manures

Green manure

In agriculture, a green manure is a type of cover crop grown primarily to add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Typically, a green manure crop is grown for a specific period, and then plowed under and incorporated into the soil....
s are crops grown for the express purpose of plowing them in, thus increasing fertility through the incorporation of nutrients and organic matter into the soil. Leguminous plants

Legume

A legume is a plant in the family Fabaceae , or a fruit of these specific plants. A legume fruit is a Fruit#Simple fruit that develops from a simple carpel and usually Dehiscence on two sides....
such as clover are often used for this, as they fix nitrogen using Rhizobia
Rhizobia

Rhizobia are soil bacterium that Nitrogen fixation nitrogen after becoming established inside root nodules of legumes . Rhizobia require a plant host; they cannot independently fix nitrogen....
bacteria in specialized nodes

Root nodule

Root nodules occur on the roots of plants that associate with symbiotic bacterium.Under nitrogen limiting conditions, plants from the pea family Fabaceae form a symbiotic relationship with a host-specific strain of bacteria known as rhizobia....
in the root structure.

Other types of plant matter used as manure include the contents of the rumen

Rumen

The rumen, also known as a paunch, forms the larger part of the reticulorumen, which is the first chamber in the alimentary canal of ruminant animals....
s of slaughtered ruminant

Ruminant

Physiologically, a ruminant is a mammal of the order Artiodactyla that digests plant-based food by initially softening it within the animal's first stomach, known as the rumen, then regurgitating the semi-digested mass, now known as cud, and chewing it again....
s, spent hops

Hops

Hops are the female flower cones, also known as strobiles, of the hop . They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, though hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and Herbalism....
(left over from brewing

Brewing

Brewing is the production of alcoholic beverages and alcohol fuel through fermentation . The term is used for the production of beer, although the word "brewing" is also used to describe the fermentation process used to create wine and mead....
beer

Beer

Beer is the world's oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and Fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal?the most common of which is malted barley, although wheat, maize , and rice are widely used....
) and seaweed

Seaweed

Seaweed is a loose colloquial term encompassing macroscopic, multicellular, benthos ocean algae. The term includes some members of the rhodophyta, phycophyta and green algae....
.

Uses of manure

Animal dung has been used for centuries as a fertilizer

Fertilizer

Nitrogen

Nitrogen is a chemical element that has the symbol N and atomic number 7 and atomic mass 14.00674?. Elemental nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless and mostly inert diatomic gas at standard conditions, constituting 78% by volume of Earth's atmosphere....
and other nutrients which facilitate the growth of plants. Manures with a particularly unpleasant odor (such as human sewage or slurry from intensive pig farming

Intensive farming

Intensive farming or intensive agriculture is an agricultural production system characterized by the high inputs of Capital , Labour , or heavy usage of technologies such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers relative to land area....
) is usually knifed (injected) directly into the soil to reduce release of the odor. Manure from pigs and cattle is usually spread on fields using a manure spreader

Manure spreader

A manure spreader or muck spreader or honey wagon is an agricultural machinery used to distribute manure over a field as a fertilizer....
. Due to the relatively lower level of proteins in vegetable matter, herbivore

Herbivore

Herbivory is a form of predation in which an organism, known as an herbivore, heterotrophs principally autotrophs such as plants, algae and photosynthesizing bacteria....
manure has a milder smell than the dung of carnivore

Carnivore

A carnivore , meaning 'meat eater' , is any animal with a diet consisting mainly of meat, whether it comes from animals living or dead .In a more general sense, an animal may be considered a carnivore if it prefers feeding on animal matter over plant matter....
s or omnivore

Omnivore

Omnivores are species that eating both plants and animals as their primary food source. They are opportunistic, general feeders not specifically adapted to eat and digest either meat or plant material exclusively....
s – for example, elephant

Elephant

Elephants are large land mammals of the order Proboscidea and the family Elephantidae. There are three living species: the African Bush Elephant, the African Forest Elephant and the Asian Elephant ....
dung is practically odorless. However, herbivore slurry which has undergone anerobic fermentation

Fermentation

Fermentation may refer to:* Fermentation , the process of energy production in a cell under anaerobic conditions * Ethanol fermentation, a form of anaerobic respiration used primarily by yeasts when oxygen is not present in sufficient quantity for normal cellular respiration...
may develop more unpleasant odors, and this can be a problem in some agricultural regions. Poultry droppings are harmful to plants when fresh but after a period of compost

Compost

Compost , sometimes known as brown manure, is the end result of controlled aerobic decomposition of organic matter known as composting. It is used in landscaping, horticulture and agriculture as a soil conditioner and fertilizer to add vital humus or humic acids....
ing are valuable fertilizers.

Precautions

Manure generates heat

Heat

In physics and thermodynamics, heat is any transfer of energy from one body or thermodynamic system to another due to a difference in temperature....
as it decomposes, and it is not unheard of for manure to ignite spontaneously

Spontaneous combustion

Spontaneous combustion may refer to:* Spontaneous combustion, the self-ignition of a mass, for example, a pile of oily rags.* Spontaneous Combustion , a 2007 album by Liquid Trio Experiment...
should it be stored in a massive pile. Once such a large pile of manure is burning, it will foul the air

Air pollution

Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damages the natural environment, into the Earth's atmosphere....
over a very large area and require considerable effort to extinguish. Large feedlot

Feedlot

A feedlot or feedyard is a type of Factory farming#Confined Animal Feeding Operations which is used for finishing livestock, notably beef cattle, prior to slaughter....
s must therefore take care to ensure that piles of fresh manure (faeces) do not get excessively large. There is no serious risk of spontaneous combustion in smaller operations.

There is also a risk of insects carrying feces to food and water supplies, making them unsuitable for human consumption.

Livestock antibiotics and hormones

In 2007, a University of Minnesota study indicated that foods such as corn, lettuce and potatoes have been found to accumulate antibiotics from soils spread with animal manure that contains these drugs, and organic foods are most likely to contain these drugs because manure is often the main source of crop nutrients for organic food production.

External links

: A two part webcast series about the science available on potential risks and best management practices related to antibiotics and hormones from animal manure
, an community of practice about animal manure management

Manure

Etymology

Types

Animal manures

Compost

Plant manures

Uses of manure

Precautions

Livestock antibiotics and hormones

See also

Further reading

External links