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Old 18-03-2003, 08:44 AM
Gordon Couger
 
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Default rabbit manure; how good is it


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Richard McDermott wrote:


I met a man from New Jersey whose hobby was growing giant Halloween
pumpkins, he said he grew the state's biggest one year. He said he

would
only use rabbit manure for fertility.

I would like to know how much nitrogen rabbit manure contains. I

suspect
it
is the best nitrogen source for grasslands other than that of buffalo

manure.

I suspect that every ecosystem becomes inhabitated by a sustaining
commensalism between plants that give food to animals and those

animals
vice versa give fertilizer to those plants. The food pyramid of an

ecological

environment is one in which there is a mathematical relationship of

the
spreading
of plant nutrients and what types of animals and the number of those

animals
for that environment.

I suspect that a long time ago-- hundreds of millions of years ago,

the
grasslands
arose and called for some smallish type animal that feeds on grasses

and
multiplies very rapidly and constantly eats and prunes the grasses and

small
trees and must scatter that nitrogen nutrient. Answer: rabbits.

Can someone tell me if rabbit remains of feces and urine is any higher

in
nitrogen than is insect feces and body decay.


The nutriant content of manure depeds most ly on how they are handled
between the time the depart the animal and are taken up by the crop.

Every
day it lays in the open nitrogen is lost. The smell of manure is largly
ammonia, If it gets wet and stands water bactera make methaned out of

it.
If
it gets rained on and water doesn't stand on it the nirtogen compoundes

are
desloved and leacehed into the ground. If you are on sandy soil the

nitrogen
is quickly past the root zone if you are in clay the bacterai my turn it

to
methane. Even from the start most manures are hinger in phospahtes than

than
the crop neds when you supply all the crops nitroge needs with manure or
composte. Composting looses nrogen to the air as well.

At best you have a good source of unbalaced fertilzer at worst you have

a
poor source of very unbalece fetelizer. While manures add desirable
elemtents to the soil that minearl fertilezers don't you will spend a

very
great deal of time tending rabbint and handeling rabbitt manure to

furnish
fertizar for 10 acres of crops. Unless you are growing, coco, murajana

or
opium popies you won't make a living.
--
Gordon

Gordon Couger
Stillwater, OK
www.couger.com/gcouger



The majority of the fauna in any terrestrial ecosystem consists of
invertebrates. In any established ecosystem, where no food is being
exported, the nitrogen input must equal the nitrogen output unless the
system is changing.. The balance is affected by nitrifying and
nitrogen-fixing bacteria (principally nitrosomonas, nitrobacter and
azotobacter types) which fix atmospheric N and thus increase the available
nitrogen, and denitrifying bacteria which release gaseous N from compounds
of nitrogen. The presence or absence of lagomorphs will have at most

trivial
effects on these processes (unless they graze leguminous plants
preferentially, when they will tend to depress the amount of available
nitrogen compounds in the soil.)
--

There is also nitrogen fixed in thunderstorms and snow. Not a great deal but
it is a significant amount.

Gordon