The signature Nidera announced the case of a field that uses, among other things, the Pig manure for Fertilize plants. It’s about The picturesque, that at the Santa Rita Establishment, in Balcarce, they have harvested Wheat. There, the Baguette 820 yielded an average of 7,900 kilos per hectare, he reported.
Manure is a liquid or semi-liquid organic wastewater derived from pig feces and urine, which can be used as fertilizers and biological supplements in agriculture. As indicated, the grain had the above yield with less than 50% of the usual dose of manure. “InFertigation, the equivalent of 250 to 300 kilograms of urea per hectare is incorporated in the form of manure every 100 millimeters of irrigation. Of this, 20% is phosphorus.” announced the seed company report.
Guillermo Sojo, La Pintoresca technical advisor explained: “It rained a lot this year, so we were only able to spread 50% of the planned amount.” Juan Claudio Gonzalez, Head of the family business Casabal, He added: “We have started harvesting and the numbers confirm once again that the system is working.” In the countryside there is complete integration between agriculture, livestock farming and crop nutrition.
Sojo stated that by measuring the electrical conductivity of the water, they can determine the amount of urea equivalent used. “Everything is irrigated with manure and a strip is made with 200 kilograms of urea per hectare. If there was no difference, it means the dose of manure was correct,” he said. Savings on chemical fertilizers are very important and wheat fertilized with manure amounts to about 1000 kilograms per hectare compared to wheat fertilized with urea. them in detail.
As already mentioned, La Pintoresca, with fields in Balcarce and Capilla del Señor, was founded in the 90s by Eduardo Casabal and his daughter María Teresa. In 2014, Juan Pablo, also Eduardo’s son, joined, for whom the integration of added value became a two-way street. “La Pintoresca farms approximately 3,000 hectares in Balcarce, including 2,000 hectares of its own, with a crop rotation that includes wheat, corn, soybeans and second-class soybeans. In recent years the program has focused more on corn, driven by a pig farm.” they pointed out.
Juan Pablo decided to add value through environmental orientation. So they opened a pig farm in Balcarce, which started a decade ago with 300 sows and already employs 1,000 people. Added to this project are the 700 milked cows in Capilla del Señor, which are in the process of being converted into a stable dairy. Today they employ 75 people and do not stop growing: they start producing kiwis in Balcarce, the report says.
“We work in a cycle: we sow, we produce grain, we feed the animals and we fertilize the plants with manure.”Gonzalez said. “With the dairy and the hatchery, we consume a lot of the food we produce and feed the production back with the wastewater from the hatchery, which not only allows us to contribute to the environment, but also adds kilos to the production.” “It is truly a circular economy” Juan Pablo remarked.
The company distributes around 6,500 tons of corn to pig farming and some to dairy farming and also has its own feed factory, a drying plant and an oil press factory. “The selection of the corn is rigorous: it is analyzed months before harvest to avoid mycotoxins, and hard grain materials optimal for animal nutrition are prioritized,” they explained.
In this context, the novelty appears in agronomic management. La Pintoresca does not use conventional mineral nitrogen for both wheat and corn. “We don’t throw out urea, we use manure and the wheat thrives very well with it,” Gonzalez said.
The company explained that the system involves transporting manure from the hatchery to plots approximately seven kilometers away through pipes, pumps and then injecting it into the pivot irrigation system, which serves approximately 800 hectares. The process is strictly controlled: conductivity is measured, regular reports are generated and dosages are adjusted based on internal analysis. “We track it in Excel three times a week,” he explains.
The manure is separated into solid and liquid fractions, passes through pits, settling tanks and filter systems developed by the company itself until it reaches a pond with a capacity of 30,000 liters that supplies the irrigation systems. In a productive sense, the numbers support the system, they pointed out. “We get an average of 12,000 kilos of corn from manure alone. The nitrogen savings are enormous and it also provides phosphorus,” Gonzalez points out.
The company is advised by José Luis Costa, a retired INTA agronomist and soil specialist, who provides an important perspective: “It gives us confidence that manure nutrition changes the biology of the soil.” the manager remarked.
According to the report, the experience has been going on for five years. For irrigated corn, plots that historically yielded no more than 9,000 kilos of corn began yielding between 11,000 and 12,000 kilos per hectare. For wheat, even in campaigns with little rain, an average of 7,600 to 7,800 kilos was achieved throughFertigation with manure applied early in the harvest.
In La Pintoresca they have started monitoring with green index images to evaluate batches of manure. “This will allow us to see the comparative progress with the urea strip,” Sojo said. This year, grain protein analysis was added to evaluate data from manure-fertilized plots compared to urea-fertilized plots.
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