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Mortality Management
Regulatory Requirements
Manure & Runoff Handling
Waste Storge Pond Design


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Section 11 – Crop Rotations and Yield Goals

To plan for utilization of manure nutrients by crops, one needs plan what crops will be grown and in what sequence. Nutrient uptake will depend on yield, so one needs to have a yield goal for each crop in order to plan manure applications.

An accepted way to establish a yield goal is to average the yields of that crop on that farm for the past five years and add five percent. An experienced farmer may have other methods for setting a yield goal for a particular crop on a particular field.

As shown in Section 6, managing manure phosphorus may require rotating manure applications to once every 3 to 5 years on a particular field. Using the following table, you can design a rotation of up to five years and estimate the nutrients that will be used if the yield goals are realized. If complete utilization of phosphorus is a problem, you may want to use some crops that use a lot of phosphorus.

* Multiply the yield goal times the nutrient removal per unit of production from Table A, Section 6.