Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Manure Pits & Lagoons

We have on our farm two waste management ponds/pits/lagoons. The lagoon holds rain water and waste water from the milking parlor. The pit holds manure from the barn. We try hard to scrape everyday. We seem to have a hard time keeping our lagoon from running over due to the amount of rain water which trickles its way. To keep this from happening we pump water from the lagoon into the pit when we haul manure. To cut fertilizer costs this spring I decided to cover all my crop land with manure. To do this we needed to empty the lagoon. (Some manure always gets in the lagoon from washing down the parlor. The lagoon acts like a big septic tank with the solids digesting on the bottom.) So today I gave the lagoon a good stirring and guess what I found...
Snapping Turtles. So far I have found three. I knew they were living in this lagoon several years ago but I hadn't seen them for awhile. I don't how they manage to stay away from the prop on the manure pump but they seem to manage....
They are nasty little suckers.

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