RPCookin
Executive Chef
Eight tons of compost every year?
We're talking about farming here, not home gardening - even fairly large-scale gardening. That kind of addition is not affordable for farmers with hundreds of acres.
Compost fertilizer is quite practical for large farms. My father-in-law leases his 400 acres of land to two brothers who farm it for him and he takes a share of the crop as payment. The brothers also farm some 2000 more acres of their own land. They mostly grow dryland winter wheat and field corn, no irrigation. They fertilize exclusively now with composted manure.
We do have a bit of an advantage with more than a dozen cattle feed lots in the area. Those feed lots compost the byproduct that comes naturally from their main business of plumping up cattle before they are shipped to packing plants. and the local wheat growers get the fertilizer from them and haul it in by the semi load. This is fairly pure stuff... where they dump the truckload in the corner of the field nothing will grow the next year because the ground is chemically burned sterile by the compost by the time they get it spread on the field.
My father-in-law (age 94 now) was the first in this area to experiment with anhydrous ammonia to enrich land that was mostly worn out and no longer farmed - it revolutionized local farming and made him one of the most successful farmers around here. He was able to cheaply rent unused land from other farmers and get good crops from it. Soon everyone followed his lead. Now he and his partners have pioneered the use of composted manure to replace the ammonia fertilizer that many still use. That seems to be working quite well too, and it's currently still cheaper than chemical fertilizer.