"Billy" wrote in message
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
...
In my view whatever organic matter you can get locally and cheaply
(or free) is always superior to what you may buy or truck in.

if it is clean, sure. however, i'm wary
of taking anything from a farm these days.
things aren't the way they used to be.
animals are moved around a lot more now and
there are more resistant diseases.


To all those who say that it is essential to compost manure before
use, I ask why?

ever hear of E.coli O157:H7 ?


No but I am sure it's nasty
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you, as long as they remain open.)

p.82

One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I'm
standing in is particularly lethal to humans. Escherichia coli 0157:H7
is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal
bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle,
40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of
these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that
destroys human kidneys.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their
way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs,
since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen.
But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own
stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant
strains of E. coli, of which 0157:H7 is one, have evolved‹yet another
creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the
Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they, can shake off the
acid bath in our stomachs‹and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the
rumen with corn we've broken down one of our food chain's most important
barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.

We've recently discovered that this process of acidification can be
reversed, and that doing so can greatly diminish the threat from E. coli
0157:H7. Jim Russell, a USDA microbiologist on the faculty at Cornell,
has found that switching a cow's diet from corn to grass or hay for a
few days prior to slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157:H7 in
the animal's gut by as much as 80 percent. But such a solution (Grass?!)
is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry and (therefore)
by the USDA. Their preferred solution for dealing with bacterial
contamination is irradiation‹-essentially, to try to sterilize the
manure getting into the meat.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so
many ways to be not cheap at all.

Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.

In article ,
"Farm1" wrote:

"Billy" wrote in message
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
...
In my view whatever organic matter you can get locally and cheaply
(or free) is always superior to what you may buy or truck in.

if it is clean, sure. however, i'm wary
of taking anything from a farm these days.
things aren't the way they used to be.
animals are moved around a lot more now and
there are more resistant diseases.


To all those who say that it is essential to compost manure before
use, I ask why?

ever hear of E.coli O157:H7 ?


No but I am sure it's nasty
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you, as long as they remain open.)

p.82

One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I'm
standing in is particularly lethal to humans. Escherichia coli 0157:H7
is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal
bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle,
40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of
these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that
destroys human kidneys.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their
way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs,
since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen.
But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own
stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant
strains of E. coli, of which 0157:H7 is one, have evolved‹yet another
creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the
Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they, can shake off the
acid bath in our stomachs‹and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the
rumen with corn we've broken down one of our food chain's most important
barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.

We've recently discovered that this process of acidification can be
reversed, and that doing so can greatly diminish the threat from E. coli
0157:H7. Jim Russell, a USDA microbiologist on the faculty at Cornell,
has found that switching a cow's diet from corn to grass or hay for a
few days prior to slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157:H7 in
the animal's gut by as much as 80 percent. But such a solution (Grass?!)
is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry and (therefore)
by the USDA. Their preferred solution for dealing with bacterial
contamination is irradiation‹-essentially, to try to sterilize the
manure getting into the meat.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so
many ways to be not cheap at all.

Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.

"Twas that it were true, "From its American and West European heartland
factory farming became globalised in the later years of the twentieth
century and is still expanding and replacing traditional practices of
stock rearing in an increasing number of countries.[15] In 1990 factory
farming accounted for 30% of world meat production.[15] By 2005 this had
risen to 40%.[16]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming#History

I agree completely, we should eat the corn and pasture the steers. The
meat will cost more, but cleaning the environment will be cheaper.

Too often the Animal Factories just want to get the most money as
quickly as they can, and that means "privatizing the profits, and
socializing the costs". I have heard that factory farming can be
operated humanely and cleanly, but that requires someone who won't skin
the milk cow.

---

Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry
Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Factory...vironment/dp/B
004IK9EJQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310272843&sr=1-1
(Available at your local library, until they are closed.)

260 ANIMAL FACTORY

What irked Chuck most was that not all hog farmers were doing their part
to avoid pollution. "And it ticks me off," he said. "I spend so much
time and trouble and paperwork on all the things I do‹most of my
expenses, really‹for applying and monitoring the waste. And then some
guy somewhere just decides to let it go, and then that paints a bad
picture for all of us." But instead of confronting the bad apples, or
closing them down altogether, he said, the pork industry tried to keep
quiet and insist there were no problems. "The mistake in our industry
has been to shun people like you and run you out the door," he said to
Rick, "and give you some pamphlet saying everything's hunky dory on a
hog farm. And through the years that's created a frustration within the
environmental community‹and the media."

Chuck wanted to help develop and use an alternative technology to replace
lagoons, but he still defended the basins as safe and effective. "I
moved over 150,000 yards of clay to line various lagoons around my farm,
eighteen inches thick, compressed with a roller to over ninety-five
percent compaction, that I had to send off to a lab and get them to
certify before I could put the first drop of water in it," he explained.
"I've spent millions building these lagoons. They're not just holes
punched in the ground that leak manure into the water tables. That's
just ridiculous."

Even so, Chuck was personally involved in the hunt to make lagoons
obsolete. He and a small group of investor/hog farmers were developing
their own system for adoption by the state. One day. Chuck invited Rick
and Nicolette Hahn to see the prototype he was developing.

Chuck introduced them to the inventor, an old farmer named Don Lloyd.
Rick and Nicolette watched in wonderment as Chuck and Lloyd explained
how it worked.

"We take all the wastewater washed from the barns and pump it into this
underground holding tank, where heavy solids settle to the bottom," Chuck
said. "Now, this is all the stuff that would normally go into the
lagoon. So you see, we've already eliminated the need for a lagoon right
from the get-go." Rick liked what he was hearing so far.

Once the solids had settled out, Chuck and Lloyd siphoned water off the
top and ran it to a large above-ground tank. "Once there, we inject the
water with something called TCM, or trichloromelamine; it's a sanitizer,
attacks the

GOING NATIONAL I 261

bad organics and stuff," Chuck said. "Makes it like pure water. The
United States uses it in Afghanistan for our troops."

After the microorganisms were killed, a polymer was then injected into
the water‹the tiny polymer beads bound with paniculate matter that got
through the separator and clumped them together, pulling them down to
the bottom of the tank. "You can actually see the liquid getting
clearer," Chuck marveled. When that process was finished, the water was
removed from the top and the residual matter was ejected through a
hopper at the bottom of the tank.

Some of the cleaned water was then recycled back to the barns‹to hose
down the floors and flush the manure pits back out into the underground
separator tank, starting the whole closed-circuit process over again.
The remaining liquid was mixed with fresh aquifer water, diluting its
particulate content to the point of human drinkability.

To prove it, Don gulped down a glass of the former hogwash. The guests
gasped. "Why, it tastes just fine\" he said, smiling and wiping his
mouth. "But we don't usually drink it‹we give it to the pigs to drink.
It cuts down our groundwater use by about 40 percent."

That left the solids. Raw manure cannot be used on food crops because of
the harmful pathogens it contains, limiting its commercial value as a
fertilizer. Most of the germs can be killed through composting, though
that takes time and money to accomplish, without adding enough market
value to the manure to make the system economically feasible.

"Then we discovered an answer," Chuck said proudly. "It was worms‹
vermiculture, they call it." Lloyd devised a system that feeds waste
solids to worms on a continual basis. Inside a barn with dirt floors, he
had dug several rows of trenches‹three feet wide and about twenty-two
inches deep‹the entire length of the floor. A mix of worms and organic
matter were introduced into the trenches, and then specially designed
machinery deposited an inch of solids into each trench every morning. By
the end of the day, the worms had consumed the entire inch of food,
turning it into clean, odorless, disease-free castings. The worms
returned to the bottom of the trench, and another layer of solids was
applied to begin the process again.

"I chose a type of worm that turns this stuff into some kind of superfood
for plants," Don said. "Farmers and gardeners can't get enough of it;
they pay top dollar for it." The worm barn could yield about three tons
of the coveted "black gold" each day, he said, adding that the state
department of transportation had told him they wanted to buy it for
roadside plantings.

"And because of the value added on the manure from those little worms,"
Chuck concluded with a big grin, "it brings our net costs down to about
fourteen


262 I ANIMAL FACTORY

dollars per thousandweight," or a penny and a half per pound. "But this
is still in its early stages. We're just a little Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang kinda outfit up here."

By the middle of George W. Bush's first presidential term, it became
apparent that scientists were being pressured to publish papers that
were uncritical of concentrated livestock operations and their impact on
the environment, rural communities, animal welfare, and human health. It
gave a brand-new meaning to the term "political science."

"University and government scientists studying health threats associated
with agricultural pollution say they are harassed by farmers and trade
groups and silenced by superiors afraid to offend the powerful
industry," said a lengthy investigative article in The Des Moines
Register that ran in April 2002 under the headline AC SCIENTISTS FEEL
THE HEAT.9

"Scientists say the pressure is stopping important work meant to protect
the taxpayers, who foot most of the bill," the article said. "Even when
the work gets done, they worry about efforts to manipulate or muffle the
results." Many researchers blamed the increasingly cozy relationship
between the USDA and the industry it was supposed to regulate, and
according to some scientists, the coercion was increasing.

The USDA had stifled many proposed controversial studies by driving
them through a lengthy approval process, critics alleged. The resulting
delays would dry up grant money and the research would often get
canceled. Some accused the USDA of collaborating outright with industry
to squelch data that did not meet desired results or expectations.
--

Billy

E Pluribus Unum

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

David Hare-Scott wrote:
phorbin wrote:

Is anyone at all still concerned about aminopyralid in manure?

As for the seed issue, know the provenance of your manure. I get it from
the horses outside my window and i know for sure that it hasn't been put on
my pasture.

what a nice thing to have!


songbird

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
...
In my view whatever organic matter you can get locally and cheaply
(or free) is always superior to what you may buy or truck in.

if it is clean, sure. however, i'm wary
of taking anything from a farm these days.
things aren't the way they used to be.
animals are moved around a lot more now and
there are more resistant diseases.


To all those who say that it is essential to compost manure before
use, I ask why?

ever hear of E.coli O157:H7 ?


No but I am sure it's nasty

for children and elderly there is 6%
chance of kidney failure if infected. for
the rest of us it can mean bloody poo,
vomiting and other fun stuff.

this bacteria can be found in even healthy
animals with no obvious sign it is there short
of testing each pile of poo. it can take as
little as 100 bacteria to cause an infection
(in my opinion 1 is enough if you happen to
be really unlucky or are immunologically
under the weather).

Can you give me a reference for these statements?

aside from Billy's reference here is another i'm
wading through now:

_Microbiology, Principles and Explorations_ by
Jacquelyn Black, 5th ed, C 2002.

-----begin quote typoes my fault-----
[i sure wish Billy would delimit his quotes
similarly so i could figure out where the
quotes start and stop ]

p. 623-624

"Enterohemorragic strains of E.coli O157:H7 have
caused deadly outbreaks... It began with 2 outbreaks
in 1982, traced back to undercooked hamburbers in
fast-food chain restarants. Out of 732 cases, in
four Western U.S. states four children died. In
Japan in 1996, more than 6000 school children were
afffected. In the UK it is more likely to be acquired
from lamb than beef. The CDC now requires reporting
all cases. Because many cases are never diagnosed
statistics are uncertain, but it is estimated that
21,000 infections per year occur in the U.S, with about
250 deaths. Its prevalence in Europe, Asia, Africa.
and South America is unknown, but it is commonly
reported from Canada.

E.coli H... is found in a small number of healthy
cattle's intestines, where it is then passed out in
the manure. Meat is not the only product that can
be contaminated, apples picked up from manure-laden
soil underneath apple trees were pressed into a lethal
apple juice...

....Only about 100 cells are needed to start an
infection,..."
-----endquote-----

i tried to get the current infection rates
(as this reference is over 10yrs old) from the
CDC the other night, but my connection is slow
and it barfed before i could get the pdf
to download. i'd be interested to see it
sometime, i doubt it is fewer, but we'll see.


and then there are the flesh eating staph
bacterias going around now too. a friend
lost his foot and it's very likely it came
from horse manure.


How would you know that?

he works closely with a lot of stressed
and abused horses from many places so
he has new animals coming through at times.
many of these animals are sick and treated
with antibiotics.


i'm sticking to green manures and worm
composting of green manures, that's about all
the risk i want to take.

There are some very nasty bugs around: what chance they are found in
manure, what chance you catch them from it (assuming you are not eating the
stuff) and will composting kill every one?

no, composting will not kill every one,
but it reduces the bad guys and increases the
competitor bacterial population and fungi so
that at least is better than getting the
manure straight. but if you use a shovel to
move the poo and then don't disinfect the
shovel and then use that same shovel to
turn a veggie patch then you've just
spread the bacteria accidentally. luckily
most of them are killed off in one way or
another, but hit your shin with that same
shovel and break the skin and...


Once you discount the yuck
factor what is the real risk?

if you eat meat in the USoA you're likely
getting some exposures to many various bacteria
that haven't been caught (or are caught too
late) or reported. the regulations in this
country are pretty weak and the processing
is fast and furious.

we recieved a phone call for one meat recall
(the company had our phone number and the barcode
of the item). by sheer luck we had put that meat
in the freezer and so Ma had to go out and buy
10lbs unfrozen to use for some immediate cooking
for (counting roughly) 50 possible people. how
many people used the recalled meat right away and
how many infections could they have caused?
hundreds or thousands as it is a meat source for
many businesses.


I don't know the answer to any of those
questions. I have been handling horse for years and never got poisoning.

you live in a different country and handle
your own horses. this is much different than
how a lot of manures and animals are treated
here. there's a lot of movement of animals
and it's easy for one infected animal to
contaminate a transport vehicle, shute, holding
area, barn, manure lagoon, stream, well, ...
once that's done it's very hard to get rid of.


You can get some terrible bugs from supermarket lettuce, it seems to happen
in the USA every other week.

yes, and most of those bugs are from
manures.


We live in a soup of gazillions of microbes,
in our air, soil and water, and on our skin and every surface in our
dwellings. Life is a lottery that we all play.

yes, i agree with you in general. i cannot avoid
them, but i can learn about them and work with
them in various ways (eating good bacteria to
outcompete the bad guys, burying contaminated
items deeply, mulching to prevent splashing,
etc.).

the interesting thing about bacteria is that
besides being so many species (estimated currently
at over 5 million in some readings i've done) they
transfer genes around and it's not that uncommon
a thing at all. so the nasty bugs can transfer
those genes to bacteria that normally aren't
nasty. they suspect that is how E.coli O157:H7
got going (likely reinforced by antibiotic use
on feedlots). i don't know if they've looked
back further or not (for signs of it in frozen
blood samples from many years ago).


songbird

Farm1 wrote:
....
Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.

i'd treat manure from any source like i'd
treat chicken from the grocery store. assume
contamination and wash with non-bacterialcide
loaded soap anything that came in contact
with it.

on your own farm, with your own animals
and controls you can do as you like and
be quite safe. this however, doesn't apply
to a lot of the rest of the world that is
getting hit by a lot of feedlot meat and
manure.

i'm doing my best to avoid the trouble
by trying not to use outside manures, animals
or meats. i don't get sick that often either.
before i'd changed my habits i was getting
sick several times a month. now it's once
or twice a year (if that).


songbird

Derald wrote:
Farm1 wrote:

Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.

I wonder why the expert doesn't mention the simple expedients of washing
hands and foodstuffs prior to preparation along with actually cooking food as
the most effective defenses against ingesting live bacteria. Refraining from
eating raw vegetables of unknown origin is easy enough to do, it seems to me. A
sad necessity in some parts of the world but things ain't what they used to
be....

yep, make sure things are washed and cooked and
not cross contaminated (by using the same knife or
cutting board when switching from meat to veggie
preparation and washing hands in between).

however, for fresh veggies, it takes just one
splash to contaminate an item and then once the
bacteria are on the surface the further processing
might not remove them. including washing. bacteria
form colonies covered by films that prevent easy
destruction. the only reason more people don't
get sick is that the bacteria are mostly harmless
anyways.

the trouble is that produce is often washed when
harvested and then processed, the wash water
gets contaminated (from animal manure or human poo
if the people don't wash their hands after they poo)
and then it contaminates whatever goes through that
same water later.

most home growers don't wash their veggies in
the same water over and over again and if they
don't wash their hands after pooing they are only
likely infecting a few people and not potentially
thousands of people.

as the scale of production goes up the scale of
safety and testing should also go up, but sadly it
has not and a lot of people are sickened by it
and the costs of those illnesses are passed on to
all of us via high rates of insurance and health
care costs, disability, etc.


Which reminds me of a pure silliness: In the mid 1960's, insecticide
residues on vegetables was the hysteria du jour among the then-stylish
generation of USAsians. On one occasion my wife and I dined with a woman who
announced that she had washed the ingredients with dishwashing liquid before
preparing the salad. True.

another bubbly sort. did you notice?


songbird

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
....
This comes from CAFOs where steers are fed grains that acidify their
stomachs,

i'm not sure the exact source has ever been
tracked down, but if you read anything in
passing wing it my way.

....
i'm sticking to green manures and worm
composting of green manures, that's about all
the risk i want to take.

A sound choice, but I hate to see perfectly good manure go to waste.

me too, but it costs me money to bring in
outside manures anyways. if i can do everything
i need without the expense then it's a big
improvement in my costs.


songbird

Derald wrote:
....
Garden peas, beans and potatoes are especially sensitive to aminopyralid
and consumers are advised to test before applying manure of unknown origin,
including commercial products.


I was unable to find any independent studies of the issue. In my view,
anyone who thinks the USEPA is "independent" or "disinterested" is delusional: I
don't believe it any more than I take anything Dow publishes on the subject at
face value. They simply are grinding opposite edges of a double-bitted axe, if
you axe me.

yeah, sadly, a large portion of research done at
universities these days is sponsored by industry or
government and each has their own particular angle
and takes the results to massage them further. if
the answer isn't what they want to hear then they
discard it and hire someone else to do it again or
they don't bother to even get it right.

longer term, actual science and knowlege will win
out, but the short term damages have to be small
enough so that we can survive until the longer
term comes around. right now i fear the short
term is overpowering the longer just by the sheer
mass or inertia.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Farm1 wrote:
...
Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.

i'd treat manure from any source like i'd
treat chicken from the grocery store. assume
contamination and wash with non-bacterialcide
loaded soap anything that came in contact
with it.
The problem is solved if the meat is thoroughly cooked.
With hamburger, that means no pinkness in the middle, unless you saw it
ground.

on your own farm, with your own animals
and controls you can do as you like and
be quite safe. this however, doesn't apply
to a lot of the rest of the world that is
getting hit by a lot of feedlot meat and
manure.

i'm doing my best to avoid the trouble
by trying not to use outside manures, animals
or meats. i don't get sick that often either.
before i'd changed my habits i was getting
sick several times a month. now it's once
or twice a year (if that).


songbird
--

Billy

E Pluribus Unum

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

"songbird" wrote in message

before i'd changed my habits i was getting
sick several times a month. now it's once
or twice a year (if that).

What the .........??? Getting sick one of twice a year is appalling and as
for 'several times a month'!!!!!!

What on earth are you eating? Or perhaps more to the point, where are you
eating?

Derald wrote:

Which reminds me of a pure silliness: In the mid 1960's, insecticide
residues on vegetables was the hysteria du jour among the then-stylish
generation of USAsians. On one occasion my wife and I dined with a woman who
announced that she had washed the ingredients with dishwashing liquid before
preparing the salad. True.

Now you may encounter folks who announce they rinsed their veggies in
dilute bleach to kill any bacteria. Plus sa change, plus sa mem chose.

David Hare-Scott wrote:

... know the provenance of your manure ...

I thought of a Monty Python spoof of a Cheech and Chong movie. ;^)

Farm1 wrote:
songbird wrote:

before i'd changed my habits i was getting
sick several times a month. now it's once
or twice a year (if that).

What the .........??? Getting sick one of twice a year is appalling and as
for 'several times a month'!!!!!!

i wouldn't mind skipping those too! but if
you live around people or go out in public it's
very hard to avoid all bugs.


What on earth are you eating? Or perhaps more to the point, where are you
eating?

_was_, i used to eat fast-food three to five days
a week, but i also was using a lot of low cost budget
chicken once or twice a week. and i had a on-going
food sensitivities going on which were part of the
trouble. so even if the meat was well cooked and i
always did right with food handling it still meant
i'd get sick once in a while.

stopping fast-food solved some of the problem.
not eating chicken regularly made another chunk
of difference and then figuring out the remaining
food sensitivities and getting my gut bacteria
population "reset" took care of the most the rest
of it. now it's just a once in a while thing --
usually from when we try a new place out. so far
my great weaknesses i keep to "treats" once every
few months now and i'm being more careful there too
so they aren't causing me problems.


songbird

On Friday, January 20, 2012 12:10:35 AM UTC, Davej wrote:
I have always heard that cow manure is vastly better for gardening
than horse manure, but I do have a neighbor with a horse. What if I
composted the horse manure and allowed it to age for a year or two
before use?