Success! Today we received our final approval from the county board of commissioners for our manure lagoon! Now all we need to do is secure financing and we can call the contractors to move forward with this project. It's been another long and busy road to reach this point. The process started over 3 months ago, when we finalized the design of our lagoon. Our lagoon will store enough manure, waste water, run off water, and rain water for our 240 milking cows, a future additional 160 more cows, and 50 dry cows, plus an additional 8% extra....so basically, we're prepared for anything! This lagoon design had to be approved by an engineer, which we hired, and then sent to the county feedlot inspector for approval. After a number of changes to meet specs for the engineer and the laws of our county, we finally had plan. Then we had to revise our manure management for the additional "future" storage. That manure management plan had to be presented to the commissioners as well as the plans for the lagoon. We had a hearing last week with our county board, and then today we had final approval for the plans. Thankfully, we were not opposed by any neighbors, but we've been talking to all of them about this project for over a year. Only one commissioner had a handful of questions for Jon, so basically pain-free.
Now we are excited to move forward, in hopes that this winter we can enjoy the convenience of not having to haul manure, and the ability to only have to apply manure to our fields in the fall, when we can maximize those nutrients as a natural fertilizer!
No comments:
Post a Comment
I write this blog to share my passion for my cows and farming, please be respectful of that. I reserve the right to delete those comments which portray hate, call names, and are out right disrespectful. If you have an honest question, I will respond, to explain what we do on our farm, why we do it and how we do it. Please read with an open mind. My time to blog is short, as most of our days are spent caring for our beloved cows. Thank you!