Value of wood chips as soil conditioner/fertiliser

[Clive]

I don't get the farmer fixation with matches - why would anyone set fire to anything these days if it wasnt to create useful heat or energy ? its possibly about the most environmentally damaging thing you can do

 

[renewablejohn]

Woodchip is far to valuable as a peat substitute to be willy nilly spreading on the land. Compost it properly then you can use it in any John Innes mixes instead of peat.

 

[cows r us]

I don't get the farmer fixation with matches - why would anyone set fire to anything these days if it wasnt to create useful heat or energy ? its possibly about the most environmentally damaging thing you can do

Unless your depriving the fire of oxygen and having a go at biochar. I may have a go at this to add into the compost at the end.

 

[phil the cat]

Pile it up and it will compost eventually, in the mean time it will provide home for insect and bird life etc many of which are beneficial to your farm

Mix some FYM with it and it will compost faster

I see no logic whatsoever for burning carbon, it’s not great for the environment or our bottom line

I see what your saying and in some circumstances this may be practical. In this instance, coppicing some overgrown pp hedgerows with a tree shear, attempting to compost that material is a terrible idea. The two options to get it back to land would be to hire a chipper or cart to a more suitable location, mix with fym. Great in theory but by the time you’ve paid for the chipper, compacted/turfed up the pasture getting it in, fuelled it, ran it back to the farm every night so it doesn’t get nicked, paid someone to feed it in it, ran out with the telehandler 3 times to turn it just doesn’t stack up. I know fendts run on fairy dust but it just seems like a lot of diesel being burnt for little actual benefit!
Dumping a load of FYM on top would just mean that you couldn’t spread that material for a good few years or block the spreader with stringy hawthorn if you went after a year or so...

 

[Old McDonald]

Does the cost of chipping branch trimmings outweigh the benefits of spreading them on fields?

I see what your saying and in some circumstances this may be practical. In this instance, coppicing some overgrown pp hedgerows with a tree shear, attempting to compost that material is a terrible idea. The two options to get it back to land would be to hire a chipper or cart to a more suitable location, mix with fym. Great in theory but by the time you’ve paid for the chipper, compacted/turfed up the pasture getting it in, fuelled it, ran it back to the farm every night so it doesn’t get nicked, paid someone to feed it in it, ran out with the telehandler 3 times to turn it just doesn’t stack up. I know fendts run on fairy dust but it just seems like a lot of diesel being burnt for little actual benefit!
Dumping a load of FYM on top would just mean that you couldn’t spread that material for a good few years or block the spreader with stringy hawthorn if you went after a year or so...

To the OP. I no longer chip. Have not done so for 3 years.

I agree with the second quote. The time and cost involved does not justify the end result. I have posted elsewhere in this section about what I do. I have around 1300 trees that requie annual pruning. I have land that lies lower than the adjoing block and fenced. Above the fence is a stoned drain. I put all the prunings on the downhill side (one tractor width) as they come off the trees. Anything big enough is taken for firewood. I sow annual legume crops onto these prunings. The idea is to keep water from running onto the lower land. Eventually I might be able to work the land covered in prunings, but in the meantime it is doing no harm and I agree with the philosophy of not burning unless absolutely necessary.

 

[Martrespond]

I work with an arbchip supplier in the NE of england and he produces alot of woodfines 0-10m all from virgin wood but we are unable to sell to powerstations so ive turned to the forum to try and see what can be done is there any value in it for farmers to use or not

Thanks

 

[awkward]

I work with an arbchip supplier in the NE of england and he produces alot of woodfines 0-10m all from virgin wood but we are unable to sell to powerstations so ive turned to the forum to try and see what can be done is there any value in it for farmers to use or not

Thanks

is it fresh or seasoned. if fresh you would be lucky to get transport

 

[Martrespond]

Fresh

I will get a few pictures

 

[awkward]

would u consider inoculating it for soil conditioning

 

[martian]

It's brilliant stuff for bedding cattle on, we make a 2-3 foot layer for the outdoor corral and then bed up with straw as winter progresses. Slightly shallower base for indoor yards. It makes an excellent base, it holds the moisture nicely so you don't get that oozing of precious organic matter and mixes in with the straw manure on mucking out to make perfect compost. But, we use tree surgeons chippings which are FOC. Not sure you'd get anyone to pay for your fines @Martrespond .

On the hedge coppicing, we've been doing a fair bit under the CS scheme and we leave the trimmings for 9 months or so and then get a chipper in. We were planning on using this for the cattle/compost, but it is such good chip we've been burning it in biomass boilers. Approximately 20% price of anything you buy in...and you get £4.50 /metre of hedge from CS. We've got a lot of hedges which are boring as hell to trim every 3 years, think we'll leave then to grow on a bit and rotationally coppice. Only problem now is that the house is so warm that it's starting to crack up...

 

[cows r us]

Great stuff. We use it all the time. Would I pay for it.... No chance! It's a waste product in my eyes. I always offer to pick it up if the site is close though.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

What sort of prices are you paying for chip in the UK?
I guess it will be more in demand than here, we have an awful lot of forests and not many people.

I'm paying about £10/m3 delivered, delivery being most of the price, and it's generally pine (although I'd prefer poplar or willow).

As bedding, it's working out about £250 per year to bed down 80-130 cattle, I think I know where "as cheap as chips" came from...

 

[Rod Dumbreck]

What sort of prices are you paying for chip in the UK?
I guess it will be more in demand than here, we have an awful lot of forests and not many people.

I'm paying about £10/m3 delivered, delivery being most of the price, and it's generally pine (although I'd prefer poplar or willow).

As bedding, it's working out about £250 per year to bed down 80-130 cattle, I think I know where "as cheap as chips" came from...

Can you give us an outline of how you handle, bed up and spread etc
We get arb chips tipped up here for free, or used to. The biomass thing seems to be absorbing more around these parts so deliveries are less frequent. I put 6 inches chips over the floor before using straw over the winter, I'm thinking thats costing about £1/head every other day so deep chips looks attractive.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Can you give us an outline of how you handle, bed up and spread etc
We get arb chips tipped up here for free, or used to. The biomass thing seems to be absorbing more around these parts so deliveries are less frequent. I put 6 inches chips over the floor before using straw over the winter, I'm thinking thats costing about £1/head every other day so deep chips looks attractive.

Yeah, sure!

I can get various types of wood product here, by far the cheapest option is large unscreened chip fresh out of a large forestry chipper -because cartage is the primary cost.
We clean it out every second year, and put maybe 40cm of clean chip in for a start.
Once the top is well covered with dung, I put a good 30-40cm of wood planings/shavings in on top and let the cattle spread it out, this soon absorbs any moisture and thus packs down to only a few inches. I give this a scratch with the silage grab just to assist drainage, and put a layer of the big chip on, then a thin layer of shavings.. and just keep building it up like a layer-cake.

The stuff from last year is pretty well composted now, so it is quite well cooled by the time the second winter begins - due to summer dry we will sometimes put cattle in on their way past and just "overnight" them, to help keep the composting process going, I've also put sprinklers in there to help keep the top from baking into a hard crust.

I have read that elsewhere composting sawdust barns usually get rotavated daily but I haven't time for that, hence using the coarse chip to maintain a good degree of aeration, I failed to do this the first year and it went quite gluggy, and straw made the problem much worse - so we aren't going to do that again, it was really to give pigs a trial (re Joel Salatin's Piggaerator Pork).
I think the same thing would work as well with regular sized woodchip, or the large stuff + sawdust, it's probably really down to time in some respects as the finer chip will break down faster - just finding a balance.

These are the two grades we get.

Regulating moisture is probably a function of feeding, to an extent. We make quite a dry silage, just one cut, so the manure is pretty firm.
This is reasonably important IME, I do think that it would be a nightmare if I was to feed really juicy silage to the cattle. They are just ad-lib, I let them clean out the feed trough weekly and shovel out any crap that may be in there.

It's certainly pretty cost-effective, we are putting far more in than we need to but it's just so cheap!
Roughly it's costing $2700 this winter for the bedding and associated costs, about $2500 for silage, for about 7300 cow grazing days; that's about £2800 so about 40p/hd/day.
A good money-maker with dairy B&B paying £2.30/day at present, plus the compost output is the icing on the cake!

We'll generate about 800 ton per year, which will mean we can slap about 25 ton per acre on this year, should give the land a great kick-start!

 

[Kiwi Pete]

FWIW we just feed our biochar to the cattle and let them mix it thru the heap, seems the most practical way to do it with the time available - I work 9 hours a day off farm, and so daylight is the issue; I'll feed out in the morning and my wife follows along with the bucket and drizzles the char on top of the silage. It's only a couple of ounces per cow per day.

 

[Rod Dumbreck]

Thanks for the reply

View attachment 822378 View attachment 822380

FWIW we just feed our biochar to the cattle and let them mix it thru the heap, seems the most practical way to do it with the time available - I work 9 hours a day off farm, and so daylight is the issue; I'll feed out in the morning and my wife follows along with the bucket and drizzles the char on top of the silage. It's only a couple of ounces per cow per day.

Does your tunnel have a ZZ barrier along the other side?
Those girls look happy in there.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Thanks for the reply



Does your tunnel have a ZZ barrier along the other side?
Those girls look happy in there.

No, it's only got an adjustable single scaffold-tube rail above their neck, and a concrete trough to feed in, which goes up to their brisket.

They stand on a sloping concrete floor with a nib wall, which I run the bucket down to keep reasonably clean

The tube barrier has the disadvantage that hay/baleage isn't really much good; they tend to haul a lot of feed back inside, so we use a SPFH and watch the chop length.

Yeah, they are really content, I have put up some brush-heads on the poles now so they can have a good scratch, they have mineral buckets and warmth from below, it's a really nice environment in a poly tunnel. Nice and bright.

We only have a short winter and so it works really well for doubling-up on cattle, we have a mob outside grazing pasture, and this mob inside. When they go off to calve, we may house our bulls (depending on pasture growth/silage remaining)

 

[Poorbuthappy]

No, it's only got an adjustable single scaffold-tube rail above their neck, and a concrete trough to feed in, which goes up to their brisket. View attachment 822420
They stand on a sloping concrete floor with a nib wall, which I run the bucket down to keep reasonably clean

The tube barrier has the disadvantage that hay/baleage isn't really much good; they tend to haul a lot of feed back inside, so we use a SPFH and watch the chop length.

Yeah, they are really content, I have put up some brush-heads on the poles now so they can have a good scratch, they have mineral buckets and warmth from below, it's a really nice environment in a poly tunnel. Nice and bright.

We only have a short winter and so it works really well for doubling-up on cattle, we have a mob outside grazing pasture, and this mob inside. When they go off to calve, we may house our bulls (depending on pasture growth/silage remaining)

Did you chop the baleage Pete? I have ours chopped (when baled) and find negligible waste, using a single tube barrier as yourself. They used to waste loads before I chopped it.

 

[Humble Village Farmer]

I have recently got a tree surgeon to bring wood chip. He loves it and so do I. The plan is to use it as biodegradable hardcore for access to fields for outside stacked straw and tipping up muck. Up till now that has been virtually impossible as our fields don't travel well in winter. Depending how much he brings I'm also planning to chuck the odd load into the cattle yard and possibly chuck on the muck heap if I ever get round to composting properly. Free carbon though, I wouldn't turn it down.

 

[renewablejohn]

I have recently got a tree surgeon to bring wood chip. He loves it and so do I. The plan is to use it as biodegradable hardcore for access to fields for outside stacked straw and tipping up muck. Up till now that has been virtually impossible as our fields don't travel well in winter. Depending how much he brings I'm also planning to chuck the odd load into the cattle yard and possibly chuck on the muck heap if I ever get round to composting properly. Free carbon though, I wouldn't turn it down.

Sounds like your heading for a large fine disposing of waste with no control of the woodchip run off.