Most contractors and intermediaries will complete the manure application this week and continue to work on the agreements made. Next week many maize fields will still be fertilized. These will be the last manure spreading activities this spring.
This spring has a very short spreading season. The conditions under which the manure could be spread were ideal. As a result, many arable farmers registered at the same time. The result was that not everyone could be served in a timely manner, which sometimes led to different choices being made.
A short spreading season is particularly detrimental to the quantities of manure that can be spread. Things simply don't go faster than fast, which means that every spring there is a bottleneck in the available capacity.
The empty manure silos are positive this year. That is a phenomenon that does not occur every year. It can be concluded from this that the capacity for supplying manure left much to be desired. There was also no rainy period this spring, during which the manure silos could be filled again.
Striking things
What is also striking is the estimate that significantly less manure would have been driven to Germany. Conservative estimates indicate 80 to 100.000 m3. This is mainly due to the fact that there is less phosphate in pig slurry. As a result, more cubic meters per hectare must be spread to get the desired volume of phosphate spread. Since Germany is a relatively expensive buyer for the pig farmer, preference is given to distribution in our own country.
According to insiders, the reason why there is less phosphate in the manure is twofold. On the one hand, this may be an effect of the feed track, whereby less phosphate is incorporated into feed. On the other hand, the manure that was deposited may have been the top layer from the livestock farmer's manure pit. The heavy manure is often at the bottom and if mixing is not possible or is not done, the diversity in the phosphate contents of the manure is great. The latter, the partial survival of the manure pits, could also explain that there is still a lot of manure in the pig farmers' hands.
Development of collection contributions
The developments in the collection contributions for the cattle slurry quotation have remained unchanged this week. The fattening pig slurry does have a slight tendency to rise. The collection contributions for solid chicken manure are developing stably.